Seven months later the United Nations admits that Hamas publishes false death tolls

@ElentirENG ES 5·13·2024 · 18:26 0

On October 25 I warned that the UN was contributing to Hamas' disinformation by spreading its false death tolls in Gaza.

The United Nations' contribution to Hamas disinformation and its bias against Israel
A Professor of Statistics dismantles the casualty figures in Gaza issued by Hamas

Some figures released by a Hamas cover

I then noticed that the UN presented these figures as provided by the "Gaza Ministry of Health", without indicating that it was a cover for Hamas, the terrorist organization that carried out the attack against Israel on the 7th. October 2023, which left more than 1,500 people murdered (including children and babies), more than 250 people kidnapped, and also acts of torture and rape. The UN accepted as good the figures provided by a terrorist organization that had an obvious interest in covering up its crimes, inflating the death toll in Gaza to demonize the attacked country, which is Israel.

A statistical study pointed out the falsehood of these figures

In March, Abraham Wyner, professor of Statistics and Data Science at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, published a study of Hamas figures warning of their falsehood. Not only did the figures show a regularity never seen in any other war, but Hamas also blamed Israel for the deaths caused by the Hamas rockets that fell in Gaza.

Despite this, many media outlets, governments and politicians have accepted as valid those Hamas figures that were disseminated by the UN without any verification and knowing well what the unreliable origin of these data was. The message they seemed to convey is that anything goes against Israel, even accepting the data provided by a criminal group.

The UN attributes the publication of false figures to the "fog of war"

Yesterday, the National Post noted that the UN has reduced the number of women and children killed in Gaza by almost half, figures provided by the Gaza Government Media Office , that is, by Hamas. The new figures imply admitting that until now the UN accepted as valid death figures that were false.

Asked by JNS, Farhan Haq, deputy spokesperson for UN Secretary General António Guterres, attributed the false figures published so far to the "fog of war", stating that regarding: "We get numbers from different sources on the ground, and then we try to cross-check them. As we cross-check them, we update the numbers, and we’ll continue to do that as that progresses."

The method applied by the UN in Gaza is not used in other wars

In relation to these figures, Hillel Neuer, executive director of the NGO UN Watch, has denounced the UN method of reporting deaths in Gaza " is the complete opposite of what they do in other conflict situations," pointing out that in Ukraine the UN has adopted "a defined methodology using individual records of civilian harm, where a standard of proof was met."

However, Neuer denounces that things change when it comes to Israel: "For reporting Gaza deaths, there is no method, and no standard of proof. All the UN does is parrot figures supplied by Hamas, which is laundered and legitimized by the UN as the neutral-sounding ‘Gaza Ministry of Health,’ or ‘Government Media Office,’ when in fact both are run by the Hamas terrorist organization."

New UN figures are similar to another Hamas cover

The National Post also cites statements by David Adesnik, research director of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), denounced that the UN does not cite the source of its new figures, which are similar to those provided by the "Gaza Ministry of Health", also in the hands of Hamas. That is to say, basically, what the UN has done is to stop using the figures provided by one of the fronts of that terrorist organization to use the figures of another of the fronts, despite the fact that neither of the two are reliable sources.

The case of the civil war in Syria and the anti-Israel bias of the UN

In such a case, the logical thing would be to do the same thing as during the civil war in Syria, when "the UN Human Rights Office announced it had stopped updating the death toll … because it could no longer verify the sources of information", says Neuer. Why hasn't the UN done this in Gaza? That is something that the organization itself must explain. Looking at its track record, there are reasonable grounds to think that the UN admitted the Hamas figures out of a bias against Israel, the same bias it exhibited in December, when the UN invoked against Israel the article it has never invoked against Russia after 21 months of invasion in Ukraine.

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Photo: United Nations Photo.