by Brendan O’Neill, Spectator
Are we being lied to, or at the very least misled, about what’s going on in Gaza? It increasingly seems so. Israel is carrying out a genocide, cries the activist class. Its pummelling of Gaza is one of the most barbarous onslaughts against civilians in history, they say. New research suggests these feverish claims have no basis in truth. What Israel’s voluble haters call ‘mass murder’ is in fact a pretty normal war.
Strikingly, Hamas appears to have quietly dropped thousands of deaths from its casualty figures. Its fatalities list for March 2025 dispensed with 3,400 names that were contained in its lists in August and October last year. These include 1,080 children. Just like that, overnight, Hamas erased thousands of Gazans that it previously claimed had perished as a result of Israel’s actions.
Salo Aizenberg, of the US-based non-profit group Honest Reporting, clocked the disparity. It seems these ‘deaths’ never happened, he says. ‘The numbers were falsified.’ That we’ve just witnessed the deletion of 3,400 ‘fully identified’ fatalities, 3,400 ‘deaths’ of actual named individuals, should give our media serious pause for thought before citing Hamas death counts.
Andrew Fox, the former British paratrooper who now does research for the Henry Jackson Society (HJS), thinks Hamas is trying to make its death counts look more convincing. They’ve been ‘accepting names onto that list with no evidence whatsoever’, he says. Now it seems they’re removing the names ‘they cannot substantiate at all’. Are there others among the 50,000 fatalities we so often hear about who also aren’t dead, or who died, but not as a result of Israel’s war?