Jerusalem – In his State of the Union address, President Biden used a death toll for the Gaza Strip compiled by the Hamas-run Department of Health, which put the death toll at about 30,000. These numbers have been scrutinized by a renowned University of Pennsylvania statistician who cast serious doubts on the numbers.
Abraham Weiner revealed in an interview with FOX News Digital that Hamas, a designated terrorist organization in the United States, had been releasing false casualty numbers in the war against Israel. Weiner is a tenured professor of statistics and data science at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and faculty co-director of the Wharton Sports Analytics and Business Initiative.
His dramatic findings debunk many of Hamas’ causal claims accepted at face value by President Biden’s administration, the United Nations, and many major mainstream media organizations.
Perhaps furthering Weiner’s calculations, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently announced that 13,000 terrorists have been killed in Gaza since the IDF invaded. Weiner disputed figures from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Ministry of Health, which show that Palestinians account for the deaths of more than 30,000 Palestinians since October 7. There is. The majority are children and women.
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Hamas invaded southern Israel on October 7, massacring 1,200 people, including more than 30 Americans.
“We were able to show that these numbers are incorrect,” he said, adding that based on figures reported by the Israeli government, the proportion of casualties was “not 70% women and children, but probably 30%.” It will be close to %,” he said. In the Gaza Strip, 35% are women and children.
An Israeli soldier looks out over the Gaza Strip from a tank on Friday, January 19th. (AP/Maya Areruzzo)
In an interview with Fox News Digital, Weiner revealed that Hamas, a designated terrorist organization in the United States, had released false casualty numbers in the war against Israel.
The core of Weiner’s analysis revolves around statistical variability and correlation. He said: “Hamas claims and continues to claim that about 70% of the casualties were women and children. They have not reported the Israeli killings and did not report them at the time. However, they had not reported it until mid-November.” One of its own fighters. ”
Weiner continued, “But they weren’t making a distinction between combatants and civilians. … They were just reporting that there weren’t that many deaths. Then, by February, they were reporting casualties… About 25% of civilians reported that they were their own fighters, leaving us with a strange situation…not enough civilians killed.”
He added: “They are simply missing. And this is what we call the missing men problem, which suggests that the numbers being expressed are not accurate.” Ta.
GAZA CITY, GAZA – OCTOBER 9: Civilians take part in search and rescue operations after an Israeli airstrike destroys a building in Gaza City, Gaza, on October 9, 2023. (Photo credit: Belal Khaled/Anadolu Agency, Getty Images)
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“That means the number of people dying every day is about the same. It hasn’t changed much, but that didn’t make sense to me. There’s bound to be variation in war,” Weiner said. , lulls, fluctuations due to strong increases in activity. And none of those were observable in the data. The so-called dispersion was too small.”
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked at a recent press conference why Biden cited Hamas numbers in the interview. ,
Jean-Pierre said: “What we said was really clear. Sadly, we have public data that shows the number of deaths, the number of deaths, that we have seen in Gaza. And the president was also very clear. “It was,” he said. “There’s too much going on. It’s tragic. What we’re seeing is tragic. And the president is going to keep talking about it.”
When contacted by Fox News Digital about Weiner’s report, which was first published in March by the online magazine Tablet, a US State Department spokesperson said, “Too many civilians have died in this conflict. “The death of a person is a tragedy. The number of deaths.” It’s not just a statistic, it’s a lost future, a dream, a potential. ”
U.S. President Joe Biden delivers the State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress in the House of Representatives at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC, on March 7, 2024. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) (Getty Images)
The State Department did not dispute Weiner’s findings. President Biden said in late October that he had “no confidence in the numbers that the Palestinians are using” regarding the death toll in the Gaza Strip.
But since January, both Mr. Biden and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, who accepted Hamas’s numbers as truth, have had to recant their own statistics as coming from the jihadist terrorist organization Hamas.
Weiner did not dispute the State Department’s claims about the tragedy of civilian deaths, saying, “The ratio of civilian casualties to military casualties is in the 1:1 range. And historically, this is actually a good sign of intensive care.” While war is horrific and the loss of life is tragic, we recognize that just as war is tragic and war causes death, war also creates collateral damage and only the enemy target and keep civilians as safe as possible. ”
But he said: “The stakes are very high. The only way for Hamas to win is through international pressure, whatever that is, through the United States. And the only way to get there is through the United States. The goal is to persuade civilians to attack.” ”
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Ambulances carrying victims of an Israeli airstrike crowd the entrance to the emergency ward of Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, October 15, 2023. Israel has launched a withering air campaign against Hamas terrorists who have carried out brutal attacks on Israel in Gaza. October 7th, when more than 1,400 people died in Israel. ((Photo credit: Dawood NEMER/AFP) (Photo credit: DAWOOD NEMER/AFP, Getty Images))
“The basic idea is that on days when there aren’t that many bombings, there should only be a few children and women killed,” Weiner said of the lack of correlation in Hamas’ data. “And there’s more to it than that. Many more women and women should die.” In contrast to combatants, children die on days when civilian casualties are high. You should see a few women and children, and on days when there are a lot of civilian deaths, you should see a lot of women and children. However, such a relationship did not exist. It was what we would call uncorrelated. ”
A spokesperson for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) told Fox News Digital: “The United Nations relies on the Gaza Ministry of Health as a source of information on casualties in the Gaza Strip, but this is almost impossible at this time. Because of that,” he said. To provide UN verification on a daily basis. The origin of the data used in our products is clear. ”
The United Nations does not classify Hamas as a terrorist organization.
Smoke rises above buildings in Gaza City during an Israeli airstrike on October 9, 2023. (Photo by Sameh Rahmi/NurPhoto, Getty Images)
Critics lament the failure of many traditional news outlets and politicians to distinguish between civilians killed during the war and Hamas terrorists, and say the terrorist organization has reportedly fabricated the death toll. It emphasizes that it provides the numbers.
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Weiner said in 2011, two years after Israel’s operation against Hamas terrorists in Gaza in 2009, that Israel’s center-left daily Haaretz reported that “Hamas has been telling the public about the magnitude of its losses.” The losses were reported as 49, but were actually more than 700, as Israel had originally said.
He added: “So Israel has a good record of tracking the number of Hamas fighters it has killed, but Hamas does not have a good record. Yet the media largely ignores Israeli claims. or even if they were reported.”
