Gazan deaths figures are deceptive

They include terrorists and civilians killed by terrorists

On October 7, the terrorist group Hamas struck southern Israel. They seemed to have made a list of every awful, unspeakable thing humans have ever been rumored to do in history, and took on the challenge of doing them all in one day. They murdered over a thousand Israelis and tourists, including communal farmers and peace concertgoers, and kidnapped over 200, including babies. They raped women, killing some victims and taking others with them. They baked at least one living baby in the family oven. They beheaded babies and adults. Between murdering a father and his quivering sons, they paused to raid the fridge. They paraded both the living and the dead — always women — in front of crowds of cheering Gazans. Note where her pants are bloody, and that they cut her Achilles tendon so she can’t run:

They recorded their acts, often with head-mounted GoPro style cameras. They sent video of rapes/murders to families of the victims or posted them on the victim’s own Facebook account. Never in human history has evil of this nature made such a spectacle of itself — it was as if demons had burst out of hell on the news that God was dead.

[Israelis are largely unarmed by law, making them easy prey for terrorists with guns, knives, or numbers.]

Israel is now set on destroying Hamas. Legacy leftist media and leftist politicians often tout Gazan death totals, always multiples of 1,000 for some reason. The figures come from Hamas, so they’re of no interest. (Attestations of their reliability from the UN or leftist, anti-Israel NGOs would only be of interest to people unfamiliar with the UN and the track record of leftist NGOs.)

Reliability notwithstanding, leftist media have somehow missed that any “Gazan deaths” figure includes:

1. Terrorists

2. Civilians killed by terrorists

I would think this was obvious. Whatever is left after removing those categories would approximate civilians killed by Israel (CKI), which is presumably what people care about, along with the circumstances. I’m stunned to see so many media figures, leftist activists, and freshly out-of-the-closet antisemites refer to N thousand deaths as though they’re all 1) civilians, and 2) killed by Israel. We’ve seen a collapse of basic standards of journalism in the coverage of Israel’s war on Hamas, and it also looks like a deeper collapse of intelligence, consistent with the broader marked decline in the intelligence of leftist discourse. (If you haven’t noticed it, compare the New York Times, Washington Post, Daily Beast, and the Atlantic to the Free Press, Tablet, Quillette, Reduxx, Free Beacon, City Journal, The Federalist, and random Substack writers. Or compare the Harvard president’s statements to her predecessors in the 1960s.)

I predict that most deaths are terrorists. I have no prediction for what share of civilians were killed by Israel vs. the terrorist groups (Hamas is one of several), and Hamas is responsbile for all such deaths.

The hospital hoax where Hamas lied about an Israeli airstrike destroying a hospital and causing over 500 casualties gives us three lessons:

1. Hamas doesn’t just bake babies — they also lie exuberantly. Their Ministry of Health simply lied about the hospital explosion and its toll. Nothing coming from them can be of interest.

2. Terrorists kill Gazans with some frequency – a stray rocket launched by Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) apparently hit the hospital parking lot, killing 0-50 people by my calculations.

3. Legacy leftist media appear to be Hamas shills, not journalists per se. Not only did they trumpet the claims of a mass murdering, raping, and kidnapping terrorist group, they converted 500 casualties to 500 killed (casualties includes wounded, and wounded generally outnumber killed in a casualties total). The New York Times even used a photo of a different, actually bombed, building under their false hospital headline, rehired a pro-Hitler Hamas shill, and glowingly profiled a different Hamas shill who joked about whether Hamas used baking powder in baking an Israeli baby. BBC and MSNBC, then CBS, NBC, and ABC featured obviously fake footage by a notorious, comical Hamas crisis actor who plays different characters in different videos, a creep well known to X/Twitter users for several weeks. He’s so amateurish that he’s always spiffy and spotless, even here after claiming to have carried bodies. The “blood” is neatly applied to his free hand only:

That the terrorists kill Gazans is a critical lesson from the hospital hoax. Hamas and PIJ fire thousands of unguided rockets into Israel from Gaza, trying to kill innocent civilians. Apparently 10-30% of those cheap rockets fail, typically falling short and landing in Gaza. Some of those failures kill Gazans, as might have happened in the hospital parking lot. These are unguided, dumb rockets, with impact or altitude fuzes — they don’t know where they are, and lack any apparent safety features, so they’ll detonate wherever they hit. I also see credible reports of Hamas shooting civilians heading south (and the IDF now protecting them).

A Gazan deaths total breaks down into a 2 × 2 table:

Since Israel doesn’t target civilians, we’d want to know precisely how they were killed, the circumstances. It likely comes down to:

1. They were killed in an attack on a Hamas/PIJ target.

2. They were killed accidentally, due to a targeting error, bad intel, a defective munition, etc.

Civilians killed in attacks on terrorist targets would presumably either be human shields or collateral damage where, for example, a bomb is powerful enough to destroy a terrorist ammo dump as well as a nearby home. I haven’t seen any detailed reporting on these incidents. Note that unlike the terrorists, Israel generally uses guided weapons like the JDAM and Spice glide bombs — they use GPS to achieve sub-5-meter accuracy. There would be massively higher civilian casualties in any other era.

Accidents are common in war. I lost track of how many weddings the US bombed in Afghanistan, but one example was the Uruzgan wedding bombing where the wedding party shooting guns into the air – a common practice with Afghans and some Mexicans – was confused for hostile fire by an AC-130 gunship. Cultural differences.

Given the fact that Israel doesn’t target civilians, and that they persistently and energetically warned civilians in northern Gaza for weeks to clear the area, any claims of civilians killed by Israel should come with details.

Children

Claims about child deaths have two issues:

1. Terrorists

2. Terrorists’ families

We can assume 16- and 17-year-old terrorists are logged as children. There’s nothing Israel can do about Hamas age requirements. Second, if Israel hits a Hamas commander and he has his children in his home, in Gaza, in the midst of Israel’s retaliation for Hamas’s mass murder, rape, and kidnapping, who is culpable if his children are killed? The terrorist, obviously. It’s unethical to cite “child” death counts without disclosing the number of terrorists and children kept close by terrorists. Moreover, we should be curious and rigorous about how children are killed in a war zone given all the warnings — why were they there? What happened exactly? I’m seeing pictures of rows of (living) babies in al-Shifa hospital, which doubles as Hamas headquarters, as of November 12, eliciting bizarre, cued lamentations from people apparently born yesterday or the day before. Whoever is responsible for those babies being there after weeks of warnings and Hamas’ use of the hospital should be fully exposed and prosecuted for war crimes. In this situation, you get them out — there were several options, and whoever did this deliberately put those babies at risk.

In conclusion, Gazan deaths include terrorists and civilians killed by terrorists, and both categories include people under the age of 18. To know how many civilians Israel killed — and the circumstances — we’ll need actual journalists on the ground. I think it’s also worth commissioning a systematic review of all US media coverage to assess its accuracy, break down the videos and images they’ve featured to sort out the fakes, and apply a rigorous framework that will surface the many forms and layers of bias they’ve displayed. Media should be held responsible for any antisemitic violence credibly triggered by their false or biased reporting. I’m happy to help with such a project.

Joe Duarte grew up in Arizona copper mining towns and earned his doctorate in Social Psychology. His dissertation focused on the role of malicious envy in driving antisemitism. His interests include the effects of political bias in academic psychology research, and lately, the extent of leftist bias in media and “fact checking”/censorship organizations. You can reach him at gravity@protonmail.com.

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Notes:

I said Israel doesn’t target civilians. My evidence is their decades of history. “Targeting civilians” means civilians are the target. Israel behaves like any other democracy — I’m not aware of a democracy that has targeted civilians in recent decades. Since I can’t prove a negative, the burden is on people claiming they do. If you want to debunk my claim here, just find an example of Israel targeting civilians. Have they ever bombed a hospital that was just a hospital? (Or even a mixed-use hospital/terrorist base — have they ever just destroyed one of those?) Any soccer game bombings? A random neighborhood just because? They’ve been falsely accused of massacres before the hospital hoax, such as in Jenin, but I’m not aware of any actual massacres where they targeted civilians. Rogue soldiers don’t count, obviously — everyone has those. I mean Israel qua Israel, the IDF deciding to target some civilians.

Moreover, it’s delusional to think Israel targets civilians or wants genocide, especially before October 7. This is one of several examples where leftists have a broken theory of mind. It would be scientifically interesting to find out more. When they accuse Israelis of genocide, what do they think is going on in their heads? How did Israelis get to be genocidal? With Middle Eastern Muslims, including Palestinians, we can point to the genocidal indoctrination in their schools and all sorts of cultural artifacts and discourse. With American leftists, we can point to how they indoctrinate young people in their new race ideology, BLM/CRT, false claims around “systemic racism”, their comic book Marxist accounts of power, “liberation”, “decolonization”, etc. and how this drives their rationalization and celebration of violence, even atrocities like Oct 7.

For the Israeli people and government, what would we point to? Humans aren’t actually genocidal by default. Israelis are very Western. They’re sentimental and prone to guilt. They have a noteworthy history with respect to being on the other side of genocide. They have mostly Western values around universalism and the sanctity of human life. They individuate humans more than is typical in Muslim and other collectivist cultures. They’re mostly secular, so a crude sectarian frame doesn’t apply. Their schools don’t brainwash kids into wanting to slaughter Muslims. They don’t have kids pre-enacting killing Muslims. Genocidal intent has to come from somewhere. Where is it?

I find it deeply disturbing to see false attributions of murderous intent, much less genocide, to other human beings. It’s not a small thing to be wrong about. It reminds me how leftists believe that if “you” own a firearm, “you” are more likely to murder your spouse. Or that domestic violence is more likely to escalate to murdering your spouse. Who are they talking to? Well, you, me, everyone apparently. They’re delusional. They misunderstood a low quality statistic comparing extremely faint rates of spousal murder, and for some reason are unaware that almost no one is a murderer (≈ 1 in 1,000) or capable of murdering their spouse. (To find the cause of that statistical difference, if it’s actually true, just go find the cause. It might be that 50% of murderers own guns vs 40% of the general pop…) They also seem unaware that most people aren’t violent with spouses or subject to such violence (and most of those who are aren’t capable of murder) — in most homes, there is no domestic violence to escalate. Mass media and leftist ideology obscure how reliable and predictable most humans are at not being murderers, thugs, etc. Leftists don’t understand humans — how different violent criminals are from everyone else, and how different many Muslims’ profound, elemental hatred of Jews is from anything most Americans can relate to. It’s not surprising that they casually assign genocidal intentions to people they know nothing about, thousands of miles away.

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Sources for the October 7 atrocity, with terrorist videos and stories of survivors:

October7.org

Hamas-Massacre.net

Resources on the basic human right of self-defense and its logical corollary, the right to bear arms:

Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership

Gun Owners of America

National Rifle Association

Gun Facts (great data, rigor)

Firearms Policy Coalition

The Firearm Blog (good reviews)

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