The Henry Jackson Society recently published a report by Andrew Fox titled ‘Questionable Counting: Analysing the Death Toll from the Hamas-Run Ministry of Health in Gaza’.
“On 7 October 2023, Hamas militants launched a war on Israel. After Israel launched its military response, media outlets around the world began to report on death tolls in Gaza, frequently citing numbers from the ‘Gaza Ministry of Health’ as though it was a fully independent, unbiased source.
In reality, the Ministry of Health (MoH) is under the full control of Hamas. It was established by Hamas in 2007 after it took full control of the Gaza Strip following its violent clashes with the Fatah faction of the Palestinian Authority. Since then, Hamas has managed governmental functions in Gaza, including health care services through the MoH.
Given that Hamas is a direct party to the conflict, this creates an obvious conflict of interest.
These MoH figures have been repeatedly cited by major news organisations throughout this conflict. For example, an April 2024 headline in The Observer stated: ‘Gaza death toll passes 34,000 as Israel and Iran missile strikes grab global attention’. In August 2024, this toll passing 40,000 was the focal point of much of the day’s BBC News coverage, as catalogued by the Cohen report of September 2024.
The reporting of these figures has been analysed by a group of international scholars, who meticulously analysed reports of Gaza war fatalities from February 2024 through May 2024. They examined 1,378 articles from major English-language newspapers and media outlets, specifically The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, CNN, the BBC, Reuters, The Associated Press and the Australian ABC.”
Chapter 5 of the report (from page 31) is titled ‘Reliability of Hamas Fatality Data in Previous Conflicts’ and it discusses Hamas’ past record, including its deliberate concealment of combatant deaths.
That issue has been raised on several occasions in our analysis of BBC reporting using Hamas provided casualty figures.
For example, in November 2024 the BBC’s Mallory Moench told readers of a BBC News website report that:
“Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry, whose figures the UN sees as reliable, has reported a death toll of more than 43,300 people over the past 13 months. Many more bodies are believed to remain under the rubble of bombarded buildings.”
The link in that paragraph leads to an August 2024 report by Yolande Knell and members of the BBC Verify team which includes the following:
“International journalists, including the BBC, are blocked by Israel from entering Gaza independently, so are unable to verify figures from either side.
In the past, figures from the Gaza Ministry of Health (MoH) were widely used in times of conflict and seen as reliable by the UN and international institutions.”
As we noted at the time, a similar narrative was also promoted by BBC Verify in November 2023:
“US President Joe Biden has said he has “no confidence” in the Gaza statistics. But international organisations, such as the UN’s World Heath Organization (WHO), have said they have no reason to disbelieve them. […]
The BBC also spoke to the UN and Human Rights Watch – both of which said they had no reason to disbelieve the figures released by the health ministry in Gaza.
The UN relies on the health ministry as a source for casualty figures in the area.”
It is of course worth noting that even when the BBC did have free access to the Gaza Strip – for example during the 2014 conflict – it did not “verify figures” but rather, like “the UN” which it cites in order to imply credibility, it relied on Hamas supplied data:
BBC COMPLAINTS DEFENDS ITS USE OF HAMAS SUPPLIED CASUALTY FIGURES
In other words, there is nothing new about the BBC’s promotion of unsubstantiated Hamas claims on the topic of casualty figures. That editorial policy has been employed for at least a decade and it continues to this day, despite the establishment of the dedicated ‘fact checking’ department BBC Verify and despite multiple analysts having cautioned – both during the current conflict and previous ones – that the information provided by a terrorist organisation which exploits the issue for propaganda purposes is not reliable.
Just hours after the appearance of the HJS report, the BBC News website published an article which closes as follows:
“So far, at least 44,875 people have been killed and more than 100,000 injured – mostly civilians, the Hamas-run health ministry says. The UN regards these figures as reliable.”
Apparently the BBC has no intention of addressing the issue of its decade-long failure to report Gaza Strip casualty figures accurately and the damage done to its credibility by the serial, uncritical promotion of a terrorist organisation’s unverified claims.
Related Articles:
BBC AMENDS HEADLINE FOLLOWING CAMERA UK COMPLAINT
BBC NEWS CONTINUES TO PROMOTE HAMAS CASUALTY CLAIMS
BBC’S FACT CHECK DEPARTMENT ROOTS FOR HAMAS CASUALTY FIGURES
LOOKING BEHIND THE BBC’S ‘70% WOMEN AND CHILDREN’ MANTRA
THE BBC’S ‘GREAT RETURN MARCH’ GREAT DISAPPEARING ACT
DOCUMENTS SHOW THE ‘RELIABILITY’ OF THE SOURCE OF BBC CASUALTY FIGURES
Well seeing as 22,000 known Hamas terrorists were killed up to the end od November based on cross referencing to the IDF database, that means a 1:1 kill rate unparalleled in this type of combat, but the Islamist backed BBC just wish to deceive the general public, something they are well practised at
#defundthebbc
See https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/12/17/bbc-boss-defend-arabic-channel-criticism-gaza-war-coverage/
If you are a subscriber it is worth reading the comments about the BBC staff who go out of their way to discredit Israel at every opportunity!