The only justification I have seen for using figures provided by a proscribed terrorist organisation is that UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) have ‘largely corroborated’ them. Yet, as has now been proven conclusively, not only is UNRWA in Gaza essentially controlled by Hamas, but many of its members are Hamas operatives, including several who took part in the October 7 massacre.
A few days ago Hamas assured the world that exactly 30,960 Gazans have been killed since October 7. The mainstream media duly accepted this figure. Yet the same Hamas people who know this precise number of Gazans killed say they have no idea how many of the 134 Israeli hostages whom they have been holding in extremely secure locations for over five months are dead or alive. And not a single mainstream media voice questions the inconsistency in this knowledge about deaths in Gaza.
The Washington Institute produced a comprehensive overview of how the Hamas statistics systematically overestimated the number of children killed, while grossly underestimating the number of male combatants killed. Now the statistician Abraham Wyner (who interestingly was a key expert witness for Rand Simberg explaining the ‘hockey stick’ fraud in the recent case brought against Simberg and Mark Steyn by Michael Mann) has gone further.
Wyner’s statistical analysis demonstrates how the claimed daily fatality numbers provided by Hamas between October 26 and November 10 were clearly faked. Wyner shows that, in addition to blatant contradictions in the numbers, there were a number of statistically implausible relationships.
Wyner’s analysis is excellent but failed to note a further glaring issue with the Hamas data:
They do not provide a breakdown of ‘children’ by age or gender.
In fact, many Hamas armed combatants are teenage males aged between 14 and 19 (see also this).
Moreover, whereas it is standard to classify those under 18 as ‘children’, Hamas routinely counts combatants under the age of 20 as ‘children’. The only breakdown of casualty figures by age and gender from the ‘Palestinian Health Ministry’ that I could find is this from October 7-23 2023:
First of all note that, whereas it is normal to classify those under 18 as ’children’, Hamas
...a regional Iranian catspaw,...has the ambiguous 15-19 category, indicating that they classify all those under 20 as children. Also, there are obviously fake numbers of deaths for ages 0-4, 5-9 and 10-14. But note that even they state a disproportionate number of male deaths in the categories 10-14 and 15-19 — all of whom Hamas classify as ’children’.
In summary: a significant number of fatalities who Hamas claims are ’children’ are in fact combatants.