RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.jns.org/hamas-casualty-numbers-deliberately-fabricated-new-analysis-reveals/

The casualty figures supplied by the Gaza Health Ministry are based on false and misleading data, according to a new report.

Despite the numbers being deeply unreliable, they have been widely accepted to support genocide claims against Israel, “and thereby are a major strategic victory of Hamas’s wartime information effort,” notes the report, titled, “Hamas Casualty Reports are a Tangle of Technical Problems.”

The report was co-authored by Lewi Stone, a professor of mathematical epidemiology in the mathematical sciences department at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, and Gregory Rose, an honorary professor of law at the Australian National Centre for Ocean Resources and Security (ANCORS) at the University of Wollongong, Australia.

Stone and Rose obtained access to a dataset published in January 2025 by a London-based researcher, who had unique access to time-stamped data from the Hamas-run Health Ministry. The dataset “allowed us to undertake a more in-depth analysis of statistics at different dates of the war across regions in Gaza.”

They used data provided by the ministry itself to show that the Israel Defense Forces took measures to avoid harming women and children in Gaza.

Given that 75% of Gaza’s population comprises women and children, if attacks were random, 75% of the victims should also be women and children, Stone told JNS. But the data shows that 51% of the victims were women and children over the course of 17 months of the war. This disparity suggests women and children fatalities were far less than Hamas has been claiming, and the impact on civilians was likely smaller.

“Moreover, women and children casualties trended to become an increasingly lower monthly proportion of casualties as the war progressed across time, again something Hamas never publicized,” Stone noted.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/05/21/israel-is-still-the-worlds-scapegoat/

Is Israel really orchestrating a mass famine in Gaza? That is one of the charges currently being investigated by both the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Ever since South Africa accused Israel of committing a genocide against Gazans in December 2023, Israel and its leaders have come under intense scrutiny from these international bodies, particularly in regards to the blockade of food and aid.

It is telling that Israel is the first and only country to have been charged with the war crime of starvation. Naturally, blockades of food and other forms of aid are and have been common throughout the history of warfare. This raises two obvious questions. First, do the accusations stand up? And second, why is Israel being singled out for punishment?

These are certainly serious claims. Earlier this week, Tom Fletcher, who is in charge of the United Nations’ relief operation in Gaza, claimed that 14,000 babies could die in Gaza in the next 48 hours if aid did not reach them. The week before that, Fletcher made a speech excoriating Israel at the UN Security Council. ‘Every single one of the 2.1million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip face the risk of famine’, he said. ‘One in five faces starvation.’ Throughout Israel’s war on Hamas since 7 October 2023, humanitarian agencies have warned of the risk of famine. In recent weeks this aspect of Israel’s supposed ‘genocide’ has particularly come to the fore. The reality is that, so far at least, it remains a ‘risk’ only.

There is no doubt that the war has, as wars do, brought hardship, danger and bloodshed to the people of Gaza. But Israel has made sure that, despite various periods of blockade, enough aid has gone into the region to prevent starvation. There is even a current plan for Israel to deliver aid directly to Gaza. Ironically, this plan is being blocked by the UN itself, which likely resents being left out of the aid-distribution process. The UN’s controversial United Nations Works and Relief Agency (UNRWA) had previously been administering aid there, but was banned by Israel after it emerged that some of its staff members had taken part in the 7 October massacre.

It is also worth noting that the world seems to have forgotten about the countless other famines that have been occurring elsewhere. Last week, US president Donald Trump announced the end of 13 years of sanctions against Syria. These sanctions – which were backed by the EU, UK, Canada and Australia among others – have had a devastating impact on the Syrian people. By 2024, according to the World Food Programme: ‘A total of 9.1million people are food insecure. Both maternal malnutrition and acute malnutrition in children under five are at global emergency thresholds.’

It is generally accepted that Western economic sanctions, alongside the impact of civil war, worsened living conditions for Syrian civilians to the point of starvation. Yet where were the calls to put the US, the EU, the UK or anybody else in the dock for the consequences of their actions? Instead, the international community has congratulated itself on its role in bringing down the Assad regime.