Day 442 - Are Gazan death figures being cynically inflated?
The Times of Israel Daily Briefing
The Times of Israel
4.4 • 864 Ratings
🗓️ 21 December 2024
⏱️ 30 minutes
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Summary
Welcome to The Times of Israel's Daily Briefing, your 20-minute audio update on what's happening in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world.
Today, we bring you a bonus episode of Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploring key issues currently shaping Israel and the Jewish World, with host deputy editor Amanda Borschel-Dan speaking with Andrew Fox.
Fox, a research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society, served in the British Army from 2005 to 2021, completing three tours in Afghanistan, including one attached to the US Army Special Forces. At the transatlantic think tank, he specializes in Defense, the Middle East, and disinformation. He holds degrees in Law and Politics, Modern War Studies and Psychology.
This week, Fox and a team of researchers published a report that made international headlines titled, "Questionable Counting: Analysing the Death Toll from the Hamas-Run Ministry of Health in Gaza."
According to the report, the Palestinian death toll for the Gaza war appears to include thousands of people who died of natural causes as well as incorrect figures — partly in an effort to inflate the toll of women and children.
Worse, international media outlets are too quick to accept the figures from terror group Hamas -- usually without the scrutiny and rigor that are applied when reporting numbers supplied by Israel. The Hamas-run Health Ministry's figures, the report claims, are being manipulated for propaganda needs.
[caption id="attachment_3442530" align="alignright" width="300"] Andrew Fox, a research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society, on a research trip in the Gaza Strip, summer 2024. (courtesy)[/caption]
The Gaza health ministry, under Hamas, “has systematically inflated the death toll by failing to distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths, over-reporting fatalities among women and children and even including individuals who died before the conflict began,” the report said.
We discuss the report and hear Fox's assessment of how the IDF's operations in Gaza have played out, as well as the one arena Israel has neglected -- the fight for world opinion.
For news updates, please check out The Times of Israel’s ongoing live blog.
Discussed articles include:
UK think tank: Gaza death toll inflated to defame Israel for targeting civilians
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IMAGE: The IDF operates in the southern Gaza Strip's Rafah in this hand out image from December 16, 2024. (IDF)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast from The Times of Israel, digging into one issue facing Israel and the Jewish world right now. |
| 0:11.4 | I'm your host, Deputy Editor Amanda Borscheldan, today here with Andrew Fox in a conversation that is, I think, over a year in the making. |
| 0:19.8 | So, Andrew, thank you so much for joining me today from the UK. |
| 0:22.7 | Pleasure and thank you for inviting me. |
| 0:24.5 | We have tried so many times to meet up in person here in Israel, which you visited numerous times since the war began on October 7, 2023, often entering Gaza, as I understand it. |
| 0:37.3 | So we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk |
| 0:39.7 | about your current work with the Henry Jackson Society, which issued a report this week that is |
| 0:45.2 | making headlines across the globe and deals with how the Hamas-run Ministry of Health reports |
| 0:52.1 | Palestinian casualties in the Gaza Strip, and what agenda global media is |
| 0:57.5 | promoting in disseminating the allegedly inflated figures. But first, I think it's really important |
| 1:03.4 | to speak about your background, what makes you uniquely suited to conduct this report. So we'll get |
| 1:09.0 | to all of this and much, much more when we're back. |
| 1:25.9 | So Andrew again, thanks for joining me. And the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry today says some |
| 1:31.8 | 45,000 people in the strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far. Of course, |
| 1:38.3 | the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters. |
| 1:44.4 | Now, Israel says it has killed some 18,000 combatants in battle as of November and another |
| 1:51.1 | 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on October 7, 2023. |
| 1:57.0 | So Israel says it seeks to minimize civilian fatalities and stresses that Hamas uses Gaza's |
| 2:03.1 | civilians as human shields, fighting from civilian areas, including homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques. |
| 2:11.2 | Now, throughout the war, the ministry has claimed that roughly two-thirds of the dead were |
| 2:16.1 | women and children, And this figure has been |
| 2:18.8 | repeated by international organizations and many of the foreign media, including the AP, whose copy |
... |
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