On April 1st we noted on these pages that:
“Since the beginning of the current conflict the BBC has uncritically promoted casualty figures and breakdowns provided by Hamas sources and continues to do so even as analysts cast growing doubt on their reliability. […]
There is of course nothing novel about either the BBC’s uncritical promotion of casualty figures provided by a terrorist organisation (it embraced that practice at least a decade ago) or its dogged insistence on turning a blind eye to the issue of Palestinian deaths caused by shortfall missiles or other factors.
What is notable, however, is that since the establishment of the fact-checking and anti-disinformation department BBC Verify in May 2023, audiences have seen no improvement whatsoever in the corporation’s ability to provide them with reliable information on the topic of Palestinian casualties which is not sourced from a terrorist organisation that exploits that issue for propaganda purposes.”
Some five weeks after the October 7th atrocities, BBC Verify published a report headlined ‘How the dead are counted in Gaza’ which was discussed here:
BBC’S FACT CHECK DEPARTMENT ROOTS FOR HAMAS CASUALTY FIGURES
At the end of February BBC Verify published a report titled “Israel Gaza: Checking Israel’s claim to have killed 10,000 Hamas fighters” which was discussed here:
BBC VERIFY YET AGAIN PLAYS THE STOOGE FOR HAMAS CASUALTY FIGURES
As noted in that discussion:
“…BBC Verify’s report goes on to uncritically quote data provided by a terrorist organisation and – incredibly for a supposed ‘fact checking’ department – to promote assumptions based on that unconfirmed claim:
“The Gaza authorities’ last demographic breakdown from 29 February indicated more than 70% of those killed had been women and children.
So, with the figures suggesting less than 30% of those killed were men – some of whom are likely to be over fighting age – experts have raised questions about how Israel arrived at its claim of killing 10,000 fighters.” [emphasis added]
Get it? BBC Verify’s argument is that if 70% of the around 30,000 people reported killed – i.e. 21,000 – are women and children, then Israel’s “claim of killing 10,000 fighters” cannot be true.”
That 70% claim was examined in an article published at the Fathom Journal in March which was summed up by the Times of Israel as follows:
“…on December 11, the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry began differentiating between two different categories in its fatality data: “identified” deaths and “unregistered” deaths. […]
Speaking to The Times of Israel, Lewi and Rose explained that the “identified” deaths were those fatalities registered in Gaza hospitals, while the “unregistered” deaths were reports of fatalities supposedly collected from “reliable media sources,” according to the Gazan Ministry of Health.
But those “unregistered” figures appear to have been anything but reliable.
In their Fathom article, Simpson, Lewi and Rose pointed out that the ratio of women and children in the hospital-registered deaths was significantly lower than in the unregistered category. […]
The researchers found that 60% of the hospital-registered deaths were women and children. But that meant that in order to reach the Ministry of Health’s claim at the time that 70% of all deaths were women and children, fully 92% of the unregistered deaths must have also been women and children. This would be “statistically absurd,” the authors said.”
The ToI’s report goes on to note that in early April, the Hamas Ministry of Health revised its methodology:
“As pointed out by David Adesnik from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies organization, at the beginning of April the ministry changed its categories into those for whom there was complete data and those for whom there was only “incomplete data” — some 11,300 of the total 33,000 fatalities at the time.”
The FDD has also noted that: [emphasis added]
“As of April 1, the ministry also stopped repeating the claim it made since the first weeks of the war that 70 percent of the dead were women and children, even suggesting the media invented this number. Meanwhile, the GMO continues to promote the 70 percent figure while revising its own numbers upwards, to remain consistent with that claim.”
In early May journalists noted that the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA) had released an interesting infographic. As explained by the Times of Israel:
“Until May 6, OCHA was citing only the over-34,000 death toll, and the far higher figures for women and children fatalities which were reported by the Hamas-controlled Government Media Office (GMO) organization in Gaza.
According to those figures, the total death toll was 34,735, of whom 9,500, or 27%, were women and over 14,500, or 42%, were children.
But on May 8, the agency adopted new figures. While it still kept the higher “reported” death toll (now at 34,844), it said “identified” fatalities stood at 24,686, of whom 4,959 (20%) were women and 7,797 (32%) were children.
Those revised figures constitute a 52% reduction in the reported number of women killed and a 53% reduction in the reported number of children killed during the war.”
UNOCHA’s change from using Hamas Government Media Office figures to Hamas Ministry of Health figures was explained by a UN spokesman as attributable to the “fog of war”.
Around a week after that story had emerged, BBC Verify produced a report titled “Gaza war: Why is the UN citing lower death toll for women and children?”. Credited to Jake Horton, Shayan Sardarizadeh and Adam Durbin, with “data analysis by Rob England and Daniel Wainwright”, that report tells BBC audiences that:
“The United Nations has revised down the figure it publishes for the proportion of women and children killed in Gaza, leading to claims fewer Palestinians have been killed since Israel launched its offensive following the Hamas attack of 7 October.
On 6 May, the UN said that 69% of reported fatalities were women and children. Two days later, it said this figure was 52%.
The overall number of reported deaths in Gaza – which currently stands at more than 35,000 – has not changed, but the UN now says incomplete information has led to the revision.
The UN says it is now relying on figures from the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza, rather than from the Hamas-run Government Media Office (GMO).”
Later, readers are told that:
“The number of women and children killed is deeply contested because it is often interpreted as an indication of the number of civilian deaths.”
And:
“We have done our own analysis of detailed data released by the health ministry, and also found that 52% of the fatalities were listed as women and children (anyone under 18). In addition, 43% were men and another 5% were “unknown” (missing information such as an age or gender).”
As in its February report, once again BBC Verify has nothing to tell readers about the fact that Hamas and other terrorist organisations recruit minors – i.e. individuals who would be classed as children according to the Hamas statistics – and provides no information on the topic of casualties caused by shortfall missiles or other terrorist armaments.
As readers cannot have failed to notice, BBC reports – including by BBC Verify – quoted and promoted the Hamas touted 70% figure for months on end – for example:
“Since then, more than 19,400 people have been killed in Gaza, about 70% of them women and children, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.” [source] 18/12/2023, David Gritten
“Women and children make up about 70% of those who have been killed in Gaza during the current conflict, says the Hamas-run health ministry.” [source] 20/12/2023, BBC Verify
“Since then, more than 19,600 people have been killed in Gaza, about 70% of them women and children, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.” [source] 20/12/2023, Nada Tawfik and David Gritten
“Gaza’s health ministry says children and women make up 70% of the more than 30,700 people who have been killed and 72,000 others injured in the territory since the start of the war.” [source] 6/3/2024, David Gritten
“Since then, Israel has bombed Gaza relentlessly, killing more than 31,000 people according to officials in the Hamas-run territory. 70% of the dead there are women and children.” [source] 17/3/2024, Orla Guerin
“Israel’s war aims have come at an immense cost to Palestinians in Gaza. More than 33,000 people have been killed, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.
The ministry’s latest demographic breakdown from 5 April indicates more than 70% of those killed were women and children.” [source] 6/4/2024, BBC Verify
“More than 33,000 people have been killed in Gaza, 70% of them children and women, the Hamas-run health ministry says.” [source] 15/4/2024, David Gritten
That editorial policy remained in place even as the reliability of figures provided by a terrorist organisation and promoted by assorted UN agencies without independent verification was being called into question by analysts. Moreover, the BBC continued to promote that 70% figure even though – as documented by Gabriel Epstein at WINEP – the data did not back it up and after the UN and the Hamas health ministry had itself stopped using that figure.
“For months after the war began, the Health Ministry reported that 70 percent of those killed in Gaza were women and children, but its own data has not supported the claim since mid-December. The U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs stopped reporting the 70 percent figure in January, and the Health Ministry itself quietly dropped the claim in late March.” [emphasis added]
Only in recent weeks has the BBC stopped using the 70% figure and it now promotes a more generalised statement such as the example below, failing to clarify the issue of “complete” and “incomplete” records.
“At least 36,170 people have been killed across Gaza since the start of the conflict, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.”
Clearly some serious questions need to be asked about why the BBC – and in particular its ‘fact checking’ and ‘anti-disinformation’ department BBC Verify – was still promoting that “70% women and children” claim even after it became clear that it had no factual basis, thereby misleading BBC audiences with the promotion of a false narrative.
