Oversights, Erroneous Inclusions, Deception and Damn Lies -- Gaza Health Ministry

"What’s it going to take for the western media to admit that al-Shifa Hospital was, in fact, a Hamas facility?"

"We already have video showing hostages taken by Hamas during its Oct. 7 atrocities being rushed into the hospital."

"And video showing a 55-meter section of tunnel beneath the hospital, fitted with a blast-proof door and a firing hole — right near a shed filled with deadly weaponry. "

"There’s long-known eyewitness testimony, cited in a 2015 report by Amnesty International [no friend to the Jewish state] in which Palestinian victims of Hamas say specifically that the terror cadre used the hospital for torture, interrogation and detention."

"That testimony was all but confirmed in a recent interview with a UK doctor, who said: 'When I was first asked to work there, I was told there was a part of the hospital I was not to go near, and if I did, I’d be in danger of being shot'."

"Indeed, as Jonathan Schanzer noted at Commentary the mainstream-media evidence goes back to 2006.

Yet the refrain still rings out across The New York Times, The Guardian and other legacy outlets: Israel claims. Israel says. Israel accuses."

"Funny, we don’t recall this grave, probing skepticism being deployed when Hamas pulled off its great agitprop coup around the Islamic Jihad rocket attack on al-Ahli hospital."

New York Post 

The al-Shifa Hospital compound in Gaza City on Nov. 7, 2023 amid the war between Israel and Hamas. Photo by BASHAR TALEB/AFP via Getty Images

The Gaza Health Ministry whose dramatic collateral-death numbers in Gaza transfix the West and whose data are taken at face value by legacy media, willing, even eager, to publish what the Ministry claims to be accurate, made no mention that 1,852 individuals it had listed as dead last October have somehow vanished from its official listing of victims of the Israel/Hamas conflict. The ministry had published a list including 50,021 names in March. A debate is ongoing over the accuracy of the Ministry's numbers with new irregularities appearing. 

The gap in the data has been tracked by a number of analysts since the beginning of the conflict. The first among whom was Salo Aizenberg to spot these gross inaccuracies. Unique ID numbers of over a thousand individuals who disappeared from the list, were placed on line by Aizenberg to enable others to double-check his analyses. Biomathematician Professor Lewi Stone from Tel Aviv University had himself noticed a pattern of inconsistencies between various versions of the list and he too spoke publicly of his findings. 

Professor Stone examined 1,792 entries appearing in the August 2024 Ministry list, but they were not present on a following list dated October. Dr. Stone's analysis discovered that 79 percent of the missing entries represented women, children and the elderly. He is preparing to produce a paper on his findings.

 

AP Photo

 

And whereas top media outlets treat the Gaza Health Ministry numbers as credible and make no effort to conduct due diligence, they do not fall all over one another when evidence surfaces that calls in question the accuracy of the numbers and the identification of women and children among them. An investigative reporter from SkyNews, Ben van der Merwe, who originally published stories sympathetic to the work of the Ministry, subsequently decided the missing names represented a big story asking for an explanation.

 

A response came courtesy of Zaher al-Wahidi, head of the statistical unit of the Gaza Health Ministry. Data was used from two principal sources; hospital death records and relatives of those whose deaths were not recorded, filing reports, frequently of a missing body. 97 percent of the entries removed from the Ministry list between October and March surfaced as reports filed by families; some of which Wahidi acknowledged may have been false claims, hoping to collect death benefits.

 

Mislabelling of deaths, the statistics chief also pointed out, with deaths from natural causes was a principal reason for the errors. Aizenberg and Stone paid attention; these analysts have long since questioned the ministry's claims it excludes natural deaths from war victims' listing. Dr. Stone estimates up to 6,000 natural deaths in a typical year in Gaza, noting that the Ministry never produces a list of natural deaths. Wahidi had previously insisted Gaza authorities carefully vet the accuracy of family reports.

 

And nor does the Ministry differentiate between Hamas operatives killed in the conflict, and civilian deaths.

 

The family must approach a "public prosecutor to verify that the event occurred (and that) the one they're registering was actually a martyr and not a natural death", following a judicial committee review of each report.  His statistics team audited the data after complaints from individuals listed as dead by the Ministry, but yet very much alive. 241 names that were removed from the list were later re-added to it and a handful were then removed a second time, according to a forthcoming analysis by Gabriel Epstein of the Israel Policy Forum. 

 

Until outsiders expose its errors, the Ministry uses problematical methods reflecting its persistent lack of transparency. 

Its track record of outright deception dates from the first days of the war when reporters were informed that Israeli airstrikes had resulted in a massive explosion at the al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, killing close to 500 people. It was, in fact, a Palestinian rocket gone astray to fall short of its target that had caused the explosion, with a much lower death count, which the Ministry has never acknowledged. Western legacy media was content to run with the Gaza Health Ministry's deception, until incontrovertible evidence was disclosed that Israel had nothing to do with the bombing of the hospital.

Footage released by the Israeli military showing an entrance to a Hamas tunnel near al-Shifa hospital. Israeli Army/AFP via Getty Images