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Israel-Palestine-Jordan
Tablet: The Gaza Ministry of Health Casualty Numbers Don't Add Up
2024-03-10
A lovely little analysis, expanding on a point we keep making here at Rantburg.
[HotAir] Since Israel entered Gaza in response to the 10/7 attack by Hamas, the Gaza Ministry of Health has been putting out casualty numbers. It was big news when those figures passed 30,000 at the end of February.

...The numbers are routinely taken as factual, even though they come from a health ministry controlled by Hamas. And as mentioned, none of the dead are listed as Hamas fighters even though Hamas fighters are the primary opponents Israel is targeting.

This week, Tablet published a story written by a professor of statistics at Wharton. Abraham Wyner argues that the Hamas-approved numbers don't make sense and are almost certainly fabricated.

...One sign that something is wrong with the numbers: There seems to be no correlation between the number of women killed and the number of children.

...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.

There are other problems:

Finally, on Feb. 15, 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.

...For Israel's part, they claim to have killed as many as 12,000 Hamas fighters since the start of their entry into Gaza.

The Israel Defense Forces said Monday that troops have killed some 12,000 of Hamas’s estimated 30,000 gunmen in the Gaza Strip since war erupted on October 7, after a Qatar-based official for the terror group claimed it had lost half that number — some 6,000 fighters — during the four-month-old conflict.

Hamas is also believed to have thousands of operatives who are seriously wounded and unable to fight.
Posted by:Grom the Reflective

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