The United Nations parroted a Hamas statistic Thursday in describing the number of civilians supposedly killed in Gaza during the ongoing war, repeating a claim by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry without distinguishing terrorists from civilians.
As the Times of Israel noted on Thursday, the Gaza Health Ministry updated its death count to 25,900. But it did not say how many were combatants.
The Times of Israel noted: “The figures are unverified and are believed to include close to 10,000 Hamas operatives Israel said it has killed during fighting in the Strip, as well as civilians killed by misfired Palestinian rockets.”
A ratio of roughy 1.5 civilians killed for every one terrorist killed is historically low, and unprecedented in urban warfare. It is also an improvement from the already low two-to-one ratio that Israel had estimated several weeks ago, early in the Gaza invasion.
The United Nations’ decision to use the Hamas figure not only echoed the worst of anti-Israel propaganda, but also eroded the crucial distinction between civilians and combatants that is the core of international humanitarian law during wartime.
Anne Bayefsky, director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust and senior editor at Human Rights Voices, commented: “The UN’s official news service claims ALL Palestinians killed in Gaza are ‘civilians.’ Proof positive that United Nations’ numbers concerning Gaza are utterly unreliable.
“Instead, the global body is effectively operating as the Hamas PR agency, disseminating disinformation and blood libels against the Jewish state around the world.”
The Gaza Health Ministry infamously lied about the number of people killed in an explosion at a hospital in Gaza City early in the war, which turned out to be the result of an errant Palestinian rocket that landed in the parking lot, not on the hospital itself.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the 2021 e-book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now updated with a new foreword. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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