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Hamas Lies, and the Media Believed It
(U.S. News) Oren Kessler - Hamas lies systematically, instructing civilians to misinform the foreign press. It lies habitually, with a formidable record of mendacity from previous conflicts. And it lies guiltlessly, convinced that the objectives of "resistance" supersede quaint notions of truth-telling. Nonetheless, since Israel launched Operation Protective Edge over a month ago, Western media have relied on Gaza's Hamas-run Health Ministry for casualty tallies. Hamas Health Minister Ashraf Al-Qidra has acknowledged that he considers any fatality who not been claimed by an armed group as a civilian. And Hamas almost never admits its operatives have been killed - and instructs Gazans to do the same. Consequently, Qidra's running total labels 3/4 of Gaza deaths as civilians. The result has been thundering condemnation of Israel. After nearly a month, however, the media has belatedly cottoned to the Hamas game. Over the last week the New York Times, Al Jazeera and the BBC - none of them traditional redoubts of Zionist fervor - have begun casting doubt on their own previously reported statistics. Al Jazeera published the names - provided by the Hamas Health Ministry - of all of 1,507 known fatalities. Men of combat age are disproportionately represented. The BBC released its own breakdown, based on data provided by the UN. The conclusion: "If the Israeli attacks have been 'indiscriminate,' as the UN Human Rights Council says, it is hard to work out why they have killed so many more civilian men than women." Objective analysis of the available data reveals that the civilian proportion of deaths appears closer to half. Hundreds of dead civilians are hardly reason to celebrate, but a 1-to-1 civilian casualty ratio is remarkably low by the grim standards of war. Coalition efforts in Afghanistan produced a 3-to-1 ratio, and 4-to-1 in Iraq. Hamas mendacity is old news. During its first major clash with Israel in 2008-09, it claimed that fewer than 50 of the dead had been combatants. Years later, it conceded that the total had been identical to that acknowledged by Israel: between 600 and 700. The writer is a Middle East research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society in London.