Another plank of the extreme anti-Israel narrative collapses

For the first assertion, they rely on casualty statistics, including gender and age breakdowns, released by Hamas-run organs in Gaza. For the second, they depend on UN agencies for the numbers of aid trucks and projections of famine in parts of Gaza.

Both planks have now collapsed.

Multiple independent analyses of the Hamas-run Ministry of Health casualty data have demonstrated the casualty numbers contained statistical anomalies indicating they were heavily manipulated if not outright fabricated. All concluded the topline number as well as gender and age breakdowns were unreliable.

The most prevalent claim was that 70 per cent of the casualties were women and children, even though this was belied by Hamas' own data, which showed that since January 1, these groups comprised approximately 42 per cent of hospital-registered deaths. In June, the Associated Press found fewer than 40 per cent of casualties in April were women and minors, in line with the rest of 2024, despite women and minors comprising about 75 per cent of Gaza's population.

In April, the ministry released a revised list of 21,300 "identified fatalities", admitting it had "incomplete data" on more than 11,000 of the 33,000 deaths it claimed at the time, nearly half of which were based on unspecified "media sources". Moreover, even the "identified fatalities" list was riddled with errors and duplicates. An IDF analysis showed some minors were terrorist operatives; some terrorists were listed as female; and unrelated deaths, or from misfired rockets and Hamas IEDs were included.

One month later, the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs surreptitiously halved the number of women and children it claimed had been killed in the war, from about 9500 to 4959 and from about 14,500 to 7797, respectively.

Meanwhile, Israel claims it has killed more than 14,000 terrorist operatives, and the category of "children" includes adolescent combatants, as terrorist groups in Gaza routinely recruit under-18s. Furthermore, not all these deaths are due to Israeli activity.

Nobody knows for certain how many Palestinians have been killed or the combatant-to-civilian ratio, only that the widely reported claims are unreliable.

The second plank collapsed in May, when the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification Famine Review Committee - the UN's expert committee on identifying famine - released its review of the Famine Early Warning Systems Network analysis of the northern governorates of Gaza.

Asserting the analysis had made unwarranted assumptions and inexplicably excluded important sources of food aid - and that there wasn't nearly enough solid data - the review committee said it didn't find the network analysis asserting Gaza was suffering famine "plausible". A review committee report published June 25 concluded there was not a famine currently occurring.

The difference in estimates for kilocalories per person of the food aid entering Gaza between the two reports is staggering. The highest estimate in the former's original analysis said food aid amounted to only 51 per cent of the population's need. The review committee's lowest estimate said aid entering amounted to 109 per cent. This conclusion was in line with a working paper, published by Hebrew University, which found enough aid was getting in to feed everyone adequately even under pessimistic scenarios of food loss. This was backed up by a more recent study by Columbia University.

It is clear the problem in Gaza is not primarily enough aid entering the territory, but distribution, as it is in nearly every war zone. Due to mass looting, destroyed infrastructure, bureaucratic delays, logistical shortfalls, UN agency fears of deconfliction and the fighting itself, more than 1000 truckloads of aid already in Gaza are awaiting pick up.

The UN and Israel also vastly differ in how they count truckloads of aid, with Israel recently identifying UN "underreporting of over 8000 trucks" since the beginning of the war, and 4880 "missing" trucks in May alone.

Israel has substantially adjusted its approach since October, which is why 2024 has had a precipitous drop in civilian casualties and a massive surge in aid. The Famine Early Warning Systems Network famine projections and the UN in general seem to have simply ignored these facts. Radical activists promoted an extreme fantasy to paint Israeli behaviour as genocidal based on bad or manipulated data. This data now points in quite a different direction.