Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib on X - "Smothered & Suppressed Gazan Voices & Perspectives...
3. Hamas regularly and grossly steals aid and prevents large quantities of it from reaching desperate and needy civilians. This is done through elaborate and sophisticated mechanisms whereby the group uses small trucks, pickups, and even donkey carts to siphon tons of aid and food from warehouses and storage facilities. In addition to stealing aid, Hamas, through its Ministry of Economy and other bodies, sells aid items to Palestinians at enormously inflated prices to make money and secure revenue for the group’s post-war reemergence as a governing body. Hamas is even charging taxes and customs fees on the very aid that it is selling to private enterprises and even offers a “payment plan” that allows people to pay after the war ends.
4. Despite this being a controversial claim that is often raised by the pro-Israel side to justify horrendous bombardment and the killing of thousands of Gaza’s civilians, Hamas deliberately and specifically operates in a manner that not only puts people’s lives at risk, but seeks to derive some protection from having civilians around – aka, uses them as human shields. This has been true in numerous cases where Hamas authorities fail to give civilians information about evacuation orders or the presence of Israeli ground troops – with the goal of having people remain in their place to make it impossible for the IDF to operate and to indirectly maximize the number of casualties to put pressure on the Israelis. Some Gazans ironically now look at the “Monasiq” or COGAT’s Facebook page, or that of the Arabic-speaking IDF spokesperson to get updates on ground operations, while Hamas spokespeople regularly tell people nothing’s happening and everything’s fine, don’t go anywhere. This has resulted in numerous casualties that could have been avoided had Gazans been warned to leave or head to safety – but instead, Hamas sacrificed some of these people to ensure that there’s a civilian population throughout which it could operate.
5. Hamas’s regional backers, especially in Qatar, have enabled the group to hide the massive disaster that has befallen Gaza’s people and the enormous setback facing the Palestinian cause by acting as mouthpieces for Hamas's propaganda. This is especially true with the Arabic-speaking Aljazeera, not the English Channel, which runs a professional operation. Aljazeera starts all news broadcasts with Hamas’s propaganda videos showing attacks against the IDF and attempts to inflate the military capabilities of the group. Aljazeera does not talk about aid theft, crimes, Hamas’s corruption, or many details that could actually help paint a real picture of what’s happening in Gaza. Instead, the channel has brainwashed millions of Arab and Muslim audiences into believing that Hamas is racking up victories and achievements and is killing/maiming an unbelievable number of IDF soldiers. Additionally, the Iranian-led “Axis of Resistance” is the most dangerous, deadly alliance that used Hamas and the Palestinians in their nefarious calculous and sells empty slogans that have fooled so many non-Palestinians. In essence, the Qatari-backed Sunni Muslim Brotherhood and the Iranian-back Shia “resistance” have been the most destructive, destabilizing forces within the Middle East and have used Gaza as a piece in their evil chessboard with no actual regard for the long-term well-being and prosperity of the Palestinians.
6. There are numerous things that Gazans see and detest about Hamas but are terrified of speaking out. Despite the ferocious Israeli bombardment and massive killings of Gaza’s civilians, Hamas’s police, intelligence, and various authorities are still actively cracking down on opposition and preventing people and journalists from showing dissent and anti-Hamas voices. Importantly, people are terrified of how Hamas uses civilian infrastructure and puts its tunnels and assets underneath homes and even medical facilities without any regard for the consequences. People want to share their disapproval and anger about those things but are also worried about this being used in Israeli propaganda to justify further atrocities and targeting of civilians and infrastructure.
7. Hamas is in on the corrupt business of “coordination fees” that some Gazans have paid for years, but especially during the war, to leave the Strip through Egypt. These fees can reach up to $9,000 per person and the group collects a percentage for every Gazan leaving the Strip.
8. People feel empathy for the “foot soldiers” or Hamas’s rank and file who are being needlessly sacrificed by their leaders in a futile fight that will get thousands more of them killed, on top of the thousands of fighters who have already perished in the IDF’s ground operation. Imagine if these young men were given a different path and if they had a chance to build lives and establish families instead of dying to put some scratches on Israeli tanks while Hamas’s leaders are hiding in safety or living abroad.
9. Talk of full liberation from the river to the sea is not only illiterate, stupid, and ridiculous, but it overlooks the fact that the best Palestinians could have hoped for would have come out of the imperfect yet viable Oslo peace process, which Hamas helped destroy. Additionally, Yasser Arafat made a mistake when he partly militarized the Second Intifada that he helped launch because that gave a deadly opening for Hamas to enter the scene and grow out of control with its violent attacks. This led to the group’s 2006 electoral victory and ultimately gave it a chance to expand its political power."
Banned at ‘Guernica’ - "IT’S THE KIND OF CONTROVERSY that could only happen in the progressive intelligentsia: a row about a literary journal’s retraction of a liberal, Jewish, Israeli writer’s essay on her moral and emotional struggle after the October 7th Hamas attacks and during the war in Gaza. The essay, “From the Edges of a Broken World” by Joanna Chen, appeared on March 4 in the prestigious twenty-year-old online journal Guernica. Its publication was met with a social-media storm in which more than a dozen of the magazine’s volunteer staffers resigned—including Guernica co-publisher Madhuri Sastry—and several writers withdrew their submissions. In response, the magazine’s editors removed the essay from the site with an expression of regret for its publication and a brief promise, as yet unmet, that an explanation would be forthcoming... Chen expresses her horror at the October 7th attacks in which another Road to Recovery volunteer, Canadian peace activist Vivian Silver, was killed by Hamas; about her decision to stop and then, two weeks later, resume her volunteer work; and about trying to keep lines of communication open with both Palestinian and Jewish Israeli friends. She pointedly disagrees with a fellow volunteer upset that the Palestinians she knew through her work didn’t reach out after October 7th (they were, Chen feels, “struggling with their own problems”). She writes about her fear that some of her Palestinian acquaintances may not be alive. She also acknowledges that they could be in danger from Hamas as well as the Israeli military. For this, she has been accused of having “poeticized genocide.” As is often the case with online mobs, Chen’s bashers have sometimes decontextualized her words to the point of distortion... the likelihood is that no reading of Chen’s narrative would have appeased her detractors... Those infuriated by Chen’s essay would have likely had the same objections to an essay that extended nuance and empathy to a man accused of rape or abuse toward women, or to a white author who tried to explore the nuances and complexities of racial identity and didn’t “stay in her lane.” Indeed, the Twitter account of Writers Against the War on Gaza, a loud voice in the crusade against “Guernica’s zionism,” has also accused Chen of undisguised “white supremacy”—because she once wrote a thoughtful essay for Haaretz saying that she could “sort of” relate to faux black woman Rachel Dolezal as a Jew who had struggled with her Jewish identity, had tried to reinvent herself as a Christian, and still attended church. The key analytical factor for Chen’s critics is oppressor/oppressed. And, of course, in today’s progressive framework there’s no question about which is which in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. The responses to Chen’s essay and to its defenders, such as PEN America, leave no doubt that in the milieu from which those responses come, the only acceptable way to see Israel is as a “violent, imperialist, colonial power” and as a “settler-colonial, apartheid, and . . . genocidal regime.” Tweets from Writers Against the War on Gaza (a group whose signatories include Cornel West, Judith Butler, film producer Lilly Wachowski, Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Andrea Long Chu, and Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin) put “Israel” in quotation marks and deride the idea that “zionism could be solved through empathy, literature, and charity.” In other words, the existence of a Jewish state is a problem that requires a solution... THE GUERNICA FLAP also points to other toxic patterns—from the purposeful rejection of empathy (as Phil Klay argues in the Atlantic) to militant illiberalism. Indeed, to the progressive mob, “liberal” is as much of a damning epithet as it is to the Trumpists. Of course, Guernica’s apologetic withdrawal of the essay exemplifies illiberalism—and it’s only the latest in a trail of retractions (or demands for retraction), apologies, and resignations in the name of progressivism. (Just a few examples from the last decade: the defenestration of New York Review of Books editor Ian Buruma in 2018 after publishing Canadian broadcaster Jian Ghomeshi’s article piece about being accused, and acquitted, of sexual assault; the blowup over philosophy professor Rebecca Tuvel’s 2017 article in the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia about parallels between transgender and “transracial” identities, which involved resignations, apologies, and calls for removal; the Nation’s 2018 apology for publishing a poem by a white author writing in the voice of a homeless black woman; the sci-fi magazine Clarkesworld’s 2020 removal with apologies of a transgender author’s story which offended some activists by parodying an anti-trans meme about people identifying as “an attack helicopter.”)... The same illiberalism has manifested itself in the torrents of abuse hurled at PEN America for daring to suggest that “published work should not be yanked from circulation because it sparks public outcry or sharp disagreement.” The organization was accused of “supporting Mein Kampf” and “apologizing for genocide apologists.” It was also repeatedly accused of failing to speak up for pro-Palestinian writers who had books and cultural events canceled—even though it did speak up against such cancellations two weeks after the October 7th attacks... its toxicity should not be underestimated. It contributes to the overall cultural climate of hate. It lends more plausibility to the right’s claim that it needs to use the power of government to advance its cultural agenda because there’s no other way to counteract the power of the left. Let’s put it this way. A left that sees “From the Edges of a Broken World” as a “harmful” piece of writing that needs to be canceled isn’t terribly different from what it claims to oppose."
PEN America Statement on the Retraction of an Essay in Guernica Magazine - "In response to news that Guernica magazine retracted a personal essay by a writer living in Israel, Summer Lopez, PEN America’s chief program officer of Free Expression Programs, said the following: “A writer’s published work should not be yanked from circulation because it sparks public outcry or sharp disagreement. At its best, literature is a bridge, connecting us across differences; writers help guide the rest of us across that bridge. Individuals are free to respond, rebut or criticize as they choose. But to erase the work of a writer who sought to grapple with the complexities of the war in Gaza in her own life is to set a dangerous precedent at odds with the freedom to read and the values of free expression. The pressures on US cultural institutions in this moment—from without and within—are immense. Those with a mission to foster discourse should do so by safeguarding the freedom to write, read, imagine and tell stories—protecting liberties that will point us to a better future.”... the PEN statement itself provoked a backlash. Wrapped up in the controversy are several issues that elicit intense emotions: the anti-Israel animus on the left; antisemitism in a discourse that presumptively turns Israeli Jews into pariahs; genuine horror about the bloodshed and immiseration in Gaza, with no end in sight; and the perennial debate about “cancel culture.” Darkening the debate is the shadow of left-wing illiberalism at a time when the right-wing variety looks especially menacing. THE ESSAY THAT IGNITED the firestorm, still available in the Internet Archive, has received high praise for its searing sense of humanity, vulnerability, and empathy. Chen, a British-born writer and translator, could not be a more model Israeli progressive: She refused to serve in the Israeli Defense Forces after her family brought her to Israel as a teenager, and for the past few years she has been a volunteer for Road to Recovery, a nongovernmental organization that drives children from Palestinian territories to Israeli hospitals for treatment."
Literature is a way to push the left wing agenda
When a magazine makes a 'fulsome' apology for doing a Zionism: Phoebe Maltz Bovy on a craven literary retraction - "What Guernica did was run an essay by British-Israeli author Joanna Chen. “From the Edges of a Broken World” finds her describing her life before and after Oct. 7–from being a teenager in Israel, newly arrived from England, and unwilling to serve in the IDF–to her current status as an adult who is a member of the same volunteer organization as the late Vivian Silver, driving Palestinian children to Israeli hospitals. It’s an essay about empathy, and the challenges of keeping lines of communication open during a terrible war and an intractable conflict. Chen isn’t writing in some vague sense about ‘the Palestinians’ but about actual Palestinians with whom she either has or did have relationships. She also voices frustrations with fellow Israeli progressives. She is frustrated, to be clear, from their left... What is the objection to this essay, exactly? That Chen does not live in Israel and say, Please, Hamas, come for me next, I apologize for existing, you’re right, I’m wrong, please take the land, from the river to the sea, and who cares what comes of me, a colonizing entity who shouldn’t be here or for that matter anywhere else? Would that have been OK for Guernica? Or was the problem the non-boycotting of Israel to begin with, such that even if she’d written an essay about her desire for Israel to be wiped off the planet asap, had she done so from Israel, or from another location but while having Israeli nationality, she’d have been interchangeable with the Israeli government, and therefore a Zionist entity to be avoided at all costs? Is the problem quite simply that here is a Jewish writer who has some feelings about Jews being massacred where she lives? If this essay is too rabidly Zionistic for the charmers at Guernica, where would that leave, oh, just about any other Jewish writer out there?... let’s say you conclude—and I for one do conclude this—that the retraction isn’t just wrongheaded but antisemitic, given that it makes Jewish contributions to Guernica borderline impossible. Does this matter, one might ask, in light of, well, war? I don’t like the idea of being a columnist who says the same thing every week, but until I have some reason to think the message has gotten across, I will be tempted to insert some version of this thought into each instalment: a general atmosphere of anti-Jewish nastiness, like the retraction of a personal essay, is not as bad as war, and there’s nothing inherently antisemitic about pointing that out. But if your aim is to make the world less on Israel’s side (insofar as it is on that side to begin with), you just might want to refrain from acting in ways that remind time and time again of why Israel exists in the first place. I mean does no one else see this?"
Lahav Harkov 🎗️ on X - "The staff of @GuernicaMag resigned over an essay by a woman who refused to serve in the IDF and drives Palestinians to Israeli hospitals in her spare time, because God forbid someone might think Israelis are complex human beings, and not just demons."
Weird. The left keep claiming being woke is about "empathy". But they always weaponise empathy
Caught On Camera: Hamas Terrorists Steal Humanitarian Aid, Beat Civilians - "Hamas terrorists were caught stealing humanitarian aid then beating the civilians from whom the supplies were stolen, in footage"
Gazans face extortionate prices for smuggled aid on black market
The Zionists are so greedy that they enter a warzone to profiteer from stolen aid!
Why Isn’t More Aid Getting Into Gaza, and Will the ‘Emergency Pier’ Help? - The New York Times - "UNRWA and U.S. officials have said it is extremely difficult to distribute aid without the help of police escorts, and their security is needed to protect convoys from swarms of people. Israel has struck Palestinian officers escorting U.N. aid convoys. The absence of security officers has enabled organized criminal gangs to steal aid or attack convoys, U.S. officials and Palestinians in central and northern Gaza have also said... After the World Food Program said its trucks encountered gunfire and looting while distributing food in northern Gaza, the organization suspended its deliveries there in late February."
Damn Zionists!
leekern on X - "🇵🇸 Be under no illusion… …in the right circumstances, the Muslims marching through your streets supporting Hamas would march through your front doors and do to you what Hamas did to Israelis on October 7th They raped, killed, tortured and kidnapped Islamic fundamentalism cannot be appeased It must be opposed It must not be allowed to encroach into public spaces or gain victories in its war against religious plurality and secularism Do not let naive idiots - puffed up full of vanity - act holier than thou by allowing this totalitarian ideology to become normalised and present itself as harmless"
Sia Kordestani on X - "Hi @StateDeptSpox @PressSec @USEnvoyIran , I'm an Iranian-American and former aide to Democrats in Congress. Many Iranian-Americans are perplexed and some are offended that the White House Nowruz greeting prominently mentions Palestinians and Gaza. Palestinians do not celebrate Nowruz, and Nowruz is not an Islamic holiday. What does the situation in Gaza - no doubt an important issue - have to do with a 3000+ year old celebration connected to Zoroastrianism and ancient Iran (which is not an Arab nation)? Who wrote and who approved the inclusion of this irrelevant language?"
The terrorism supporters will still be upset at anything less than an invasion of Israel, so this virtue signalling is futile
Why hasn't Israel finished their genocide? Are they taunting us? : circlejerkaustralia - "I pay my respects to the wurra wurra tree tribe whos original land i sit farming reddit upvotes as well as all future and currently emerging victims of the pale skinned white man. Friends, why is the Palestinian genocide being delayed so long by these dog cunt Israelis? It's like they are deliberately taking their time to cause as much suffering as possible, i wish they would hurry up and get it over with so we can have them all arrested by the brave UN Peace squadron. As a [queergay] trans ally i do actually need them to complete the genocide so i can safely travel there to protest."
How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers - "The first place to look is the reported “total” number of deaths. The graph of total deaths by date is increasing with almost metronomical linearity... This regularity is almost surely not real. One would expect quite a bit of variation day to day. In fact, the daily reported casualty count over this period averages 270 plus or minus about 15%. This is strikingly little variation... Similarly, we should see variation in the number of child casualties that tracks the variation in the number of women. This is because the daily variation in death counts is caused by the variation in the number of strikes on residential buildings and tunnels which should result in considerable variability in the totals but less variation in the percentage of deaths across groups. This is a basic statistical fact about chance variability. Consequently, on the days with many women casualties there should be large numbers of children casualties, and on the days when just a few women are reported to have been killed, just a few children should be reported. This relationship can be measured and quantified by the R-square (R2 ) statistic that measures how correlated the daily casualty count for women is with the daily casualty count for children. If the numbers were real, we would expect R2 to be substantively larger than 0, tending closer to 1.0. But R2 is .017 which is statistically and substantively not different from 0... The daily number of women casualties should be highly correlated with the number of non-women and non-children (i.e., men) reported. Again, this is expected because of the nature of battle. The ebbs and flows of the bombings and attacks by Israel should cause the daily count to move together. But that is not what the data show. Not only is there not a positive correlation, there is a strong negative correlation, which makes no sense at all and establishes the third piece of evidence that the numbers are not real... it is highly suggestive that a process unconnected or loosely connected to reality was used to report the numbers. Most likely, the Hamas ministry settled on a daily total arbitrarily. We know this because the daily totals increase too consistently to be real. Then they assigned about 70% of the total to be women and children, splitting that amount randomly from day to day. Then they in-filled the number of men as set by the predetermined total. This explains all the data observed. There are other obvious red flags. The Gaza Health Ministry has consistently claimed that about 70% of the casualties are women or children. This total is far higher than the numbers reported in earlier conflicts with Israel. Another red flag, raised by Salo Aizenberg and written about extensively, is that if 70% of the casualties are women and children and 25% of the population is adult male, then either Israel is not successfully eliminating Hamas fighters or adult male casualty counts are extremely low. This by itself strongly suggests that the numbers are at a minimum grossly inaccurate and quite probably outright faked... Hamas admitted to losing 6,000 of its fighters, which represents more than 20% of the total number of casualties reported. Taken together, Hamas is reporting not only that 70% of casualties are women and children but also that 20% are fighters. This is not possible unless Israel is somehow not killing noncombatant men, or else Hamas is claiming that almost all the men in Gaza are Hamas fighters... Not only do official Palestinian death counts fail to differentiate soldiers from children, but Hamas also blames all deaths on Israel even if caused by Hamas’ own misfired rockets, accidental explosions, deliberate killings, or internal battles. One group of researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health compared Hamas reports to data on UNRWA workers. They argued that because the death rates were approximately similar, Hamas’ numbers must not be inflated. But their argument relied on a crucial and unverified assumption: that UNRWA workers are not disproportionately more likely to be killed than the general population. That premise exploded when it was uncovered that a sizable fraction of UNRWA workers are affiliated with Hamas. Some were even exposed as having participated in the Oct. 7 massacre itself... Israel estimates that at least 12,000 fighters have been killed. If that number proves to be even reasonably accurate, then the ratio of noncombatant casualties to combatants is remarkably low: at most 1.4 to 1 and perhaps as low as 1 to 1. By historical standards of urban warfare, where combatants are embedded above and below into civilian population centers, this is a remarkable and successful effort to prevent unnecessary loss of life while fighting an implacable enemy that protects itself with civilians."
Evaluation of war-related deaths in Gaza: discrepancies and data quality decline after October 26 evident - AOAV - "On October 26, 2023, the Gaza Ministry of Health (MoH) released comprehensive data on war casualties, showing a demographic shift from predominantly child victims to a higher proportion of adult males and females, alongside notable discrepancies between individually documented cases and overall mortality figures. Despite efforts to maintain data integrity through the central tracking system (CTS), disruptions such as hospital closures have led to a reliance on less robust media monitoring, resulting in a gap between CTS-documented fatalities and the MoH’s broader claims. The detailed data, covering fatalities from October 7, 2023, to January 5, 2024, underscores the challenges in accurately documenting war casualties under extreme conditions and raises questions about the reliability of the MoH’s and Gaza Government Media Office’s reported figures... Professor Daniel Silverman and I recognised the initial dataset’s validity but noted later signs of deteriorating quality. Subsequent revelations suggest the MoH’s data integrity has, indeed, been compromised over time... My analysis of the CTS data notes a subtle demographic shift – a decline in child fatalities and an increase in deaths among adult men and women. The CTS breakdown is hard to reconcile with figures released by the Gaza Government Media Office (GMO), raising questions about the underlying data collection and reporting methodologies... on January 7, the GMO’s announced breakdown – 5,835 men, 7,000 women, and 10,000 children – would be very hard to reach from the CTS baseline. To reconcile the two requires, implausibly, that media monitoring fully identified sexes and child/adult statuses of victims and that roughly 90% of these deaths were of women and children."
How Hamas Manipulates Gaza Fatality Numbers - "Although many organizations have uncritically accepted the numbers—and initially even reported them as verified facts, without any disclaimers that a party to the conflict provided them or acknowl- edging the near impossibility of providing precise, real-time fatality counts under wartime conditions— there are many reasons to treat Gaza Ministry of Health and GMO fatality numbers with skepticism... Gaza Health Ministry and GMO metrics show signs of being repeatedly massaged to omit or obscure male fatalities—the category most likely to include combatants... past Health Ministry fatality numbers have lined up somewhat closely with counts verified by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and have not deviated extraordinarily from assessments by either the Israeli government or research organizations like the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, which is closely affiliated with Israel’s defense and intelligence agencies... international organizations and NGOs have not conducted the same fatality verification effort in the current war as they have in the past... for the first time, international organizations and NGOs cannot verify the death count in real time, and have not attempted to distinguish between civilian and combatant fatalities. This contributes to a skewed perception in which the UN relays Hamas claims, giving them an air of credibility and allowing major distortions like the undercount of adult male deaths to go unchallenged... On October 26, the day before the Israeli ground invasion began, the Gaza Health Ministry published a list of 7,028 claimed dead, including (in most cases) their names, identification numbers, ages, and genders. Full identification was given to all but 281 of these individuals, allowing for closer insight into the ministry’s figures. The key weakness in this data, as in previous reports, involved the Health Ministry’s failure to distinguish civilians versus combatants killed or deaths as a result of Israeli actions versus Palestinian militant actions—whether in the course of combat or by failed rocket launches falling back into Gaza. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) estimates that about two thousand such failed rocket launches have occurred since the start of the war... A short paper in the medical journal Lancet, for example, compared Gaza Health Ministry fatality figures to those of UNRWA’s verified count of its own employees killed between October 7 and November 10, and concluded on the basis of similar trend lines alone that the Gaza ministry was not likely inflating its figures. Yet given the UN agency’s relatively small number of personnel—around 13,000—it has by far the “easier” task, while the Health Ministry (covering a population of more than two million) would likely be at greater risk of erring in its reporting. An analysis of Hamas-run Health Ministry, GMO, and OCHA fatality reports between October 7 and December 31 reveals statistical discrepancies—as does an analysis of reported fatalities in the October 17 al-Ahli Hospital blast in Gaza City, a list of the dead published October 26 by the Health Ministry, and detailed public health emergency reports published on December 11 and December 31... The low adult male fatality count coexists with a correspondingly high tally for children... The rate of adult male fatalities relative to other categories since October 28—the day of reporting after Israel’s ground invasion began—is strikingly low... he GMO reported figures suggesting that a maximum of 6,098 men could have been killed across all of Gaza, implying that just 10 had died in the northern Strip during fifty-one days of heavy ground fighting... In any conflict, cumulative fatality counts generally increase across all subgroups unless evidence emerges to invalidate earlier reports or suggest reclassifying between subgroups. In the current war, however, the Gaza Health Ministry and GMO have regularly downsized the male death count, and the general pattern of statistics shows an improbably low proportion of deaths among males—who presumably would be dying in at least their demographic proportions, if not more, due to their role in ground fighting... Hamas’s public relations and information warfare campaigns, especially after the October 17 explosion at al-Ahli Hospital, are instructive. For instance, on the night of the hospital explosion, Hamas claimed an Israeli strike had killed 471 Gazans. Israeli, U.S., and other intelligence agencies now confidently assess the disaster was caused by a failed Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket, with a death toll closer to one hundred, raising concerns that Hamas may be inflating fatality figures for other incidents as well... What can be said for certain is that Hamas-produced statistics are inconsistent, imprecise, and appear to have been systematically manipulated to downplay the number of militants killed and to exaggerate the proportion of noncombatants confirmed as dead."
Israelis hostages killed by Hamas terrorists, not airstrikes - study - The Jerusalem Post - "An Israeli team of researchers calculated that during the first two months of the war in Gaza the risk to Israeli hostages of being killed in Israeli airstrikes, as claimed by Hamas, was an unlikely 10 to 28 times greater than the risk of death to Gazans from airstrikes, according to lower Israeli and higher Hamas figures of hostage deaths. The team therefore reached a conclusion that Hamas terrorists probably murdered most or all of those killed... They concluded that there are “many possible interpretations for the striking difference in hostage deaths and Palestinian deaths from Israeli air strikes: The first is that the hostages were kept in locations less protected from the air strikes than Palestinians were. A second is that the hostages were purposely exposed to the airstrikes, but this is “not logical because many hostages who have been released reported that they had been kept in tunnels located tens of meters below the ground.” Their third possible explanation that is “more chilling,” is that Israeli hostages were not killed during Israeli airstrikes but actually murdered by Hamas terrorists, the Israeli authors wrote."
