On October 7, Hamas terrorists massacred over 1,000 Israeli civilians and took hundreds more hostage. Since then, Hamas has refused to release the remaining hostages, and reports have begun to grow about the number of hostages found dead during Israel’s military operations in Gaza.
Over the weekend, the Israel Defense Forces launched the largest hostage rescue operation since the start of the war, in an assault that took place in an area crowded with civilians. Hamas chose to hide its hostages there.All accounts indicate that when Israeli forces launched the operation, Hamas returned fire with heavy weapons, including RPGs, from civilian buildings. Given that civilians were killed during the rescue, most reasonable people would conclude that the group responsible was the one who took the hostages and hid them among its own civilians, using them as human shields against the hostage rescue teams.
But it wasn’t just the usual cadre of current and former MSNBC personalities who act as de facto mouthpieces for Hamas. Soon, a concerted campaign began to suggest that these civilian deaths were Israel’s fault, and that the death toll was far higher than it actually was.
The campaign began by uncritically repeating the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry’s death toll of more than 200 civilians.
Liberal author and Daily Beast columnist Wajahat Ali expressed his reaction:
MSNBC host Ayman Mohyeldin repeated Hamas’ talking points.
Former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan was similarly horrified by the killing of civilians during the hostage rescue — not, of course, by the hostage-takers, but by the people rescuing them.
Even the Associated Press, which continues to uncritically report the casualty figures of Hamas’ “Gaza Ministry of Health,” Forced to make concessions Recent reports have said that Hamas’ reported death toll is “inconsistent with the underlying data.” They further noted that Hamas has systematically overstated the number of women and children killed, a figure that is often used as a proxy for estimating civilian deaths: “In February, ministry officials said 75 percent of the dead were women and children, a figure that has never been confirmed in a detailed report, and as recently as March, the ministry’s daily report claimed that 72 percent of the dead were women and children, although the underlying data clearly shows that the percentage is much lower.”
The IDF estimates that the total number of casualties from the attack was fewer than 100. At this point it is impossible to know for sure which figures are correct, but any side in this war that has not systematically inflated civilian casualty figures for political gain can safely give the casualty numbers from this attack a fair shake.
Overall, Hamas’ efforts to redirect public opinion, as Ali, Hasan and Mohyeldin have attempted, have, perhaps predictably, been unsuccessful. Not convincing Americans still side with Israel in the conflict by about a two-to-one margin, according to most estimates.
