Debunking the Current Accusation That Gaza Civilian Deaths Are Contrived

"speak with a forked tongue":...to speak duplicitously or beguilingly. Likened to having the tongue of a serpent, a traditional symbol of deceit and dishonesty. ~ The Free Dictionary

Courtesy of Etsy.com.

This neat, little video illustrates how propaganda bends reality.

A concept, event, or person, as you know them, gradually fades and erases from your mind. Media like movies, TV, and social media continually project their version into your mind.

The truth, as a person originally believes, becomes faded bit by bit as the propagandized concept is constantly reinforced in a subject’s mind. Social media is particularly adept at this tactic because the device is readily available; addictive; and nearly required everywhere to do anything.

I’ve noticed several themes making the rounds in current propaganda deployment, but the attempts to discredit the Gaza death tolls remains at the top of my list.

Deriding Gaza Death Tolls

Articles are appearing such as those in Gateway Pundit (“Dismantling Lies: Report Finds Hamas Used Inflated Gaza Death Figures That Included Natural Deaths and Cancer to Stoke Anti-Israel Sentiments”) to discredit the death toll numbers from Gaza.

Israel desperately wants to get out from underneath the approbation of GENOCIDE.

• The Jerusalem Post: “Gaza death toll inflated to promote narrative that Israel targets civilians - study”

• The Telegram: “Number of civilians killed in Gaza ‘inflated to vilify Israel”

• The Daily Sceptic: “Number of Civilians Killed in Gaza “Inflated to Vilify Israel”

• Breitbart: “Report: Hamas Inflated Gaza Death Figures; Included Natural Deaths, Cancer Patients”

• Legal Insurrection: “Comprehensive Study Finds Gaza (Hamas) Health Ministry ‘Civilian’ Death Claims ‘Inflated and Misleading’”

Report by Andrew Fox of the British Henry Jackson Society: “We have identified distortion of statistics, misreporting of natural deaths, deaths from before the war started and a high likelihood of combatant deaths being included on the list.”

YouTube videos abound with this theme. Here’s one as a representative example by “The Daily Objective” produced by the Ayn Rand Centre UK.

Let’s be clear. If any error has occurred, the number have been vastly undercounted. AI-generated targets, which is how Israel now conducts war, allow up to 300 civilians murdered to kill one Hamas leader. We see this outcome in example after example from people in Gaza who testify to these outcomes.

Who is the Henry Jackson Society?

The study was conducted by the Henry Jackson Society whom a group from the University of Bath describes in a report entitled “The Henry Jackson Society and the Degeneration of British Neoconservatism: Liberal Interventionism, Islamophobia and the ‘War on Terror’” thusly:

This report examines the history, activities and politics of the Henry Jackson Society (HJS), which we argue is the leading exponent of neoconservatism in the UK today grounded in a transatlantic tradition deeply influenced by Islamophobia and an open embrace of the ‘War on Terror’.

Some international patrons of the society include such flaming American neo-cons as Robert Kagan; Bill Kristol; Richard Perle; Gen. Jack Sheehan [His bio in the report includes “…Sheehan also served as vice-president of US defence contractor Bechtel, which received the first major contract for the reconstruction of Iraq.”]; and James Woolsey.

Rather interesting is the revelation that the reason so many liberals, as we’ve seen from the Biden administration, advocate neo-con agendas is because the Democrat Party has had a deep vein residing within their structure for a very long time. They’ve evidently subsumed the party at this point.

The significance of this was clearly laid out by David Clark, a former advisor to Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, in an article in The Guardian ahead of the society’s Westminster launch.

‘It is common outside America to regard neoconservatism as synonymous with the Republican right,’ Clark wrote.

In fact, its roots lie mostly on the left. The original neoconservatives – also nicknamed Socialists for Nixon – were anti-communist leftists and liberals who became alienated from the Democratic Party when it endorsed the anti- Vietnam war candidate George McGovern for president in 1972.

We’ve clearly seen these liberal neo-cons administering foreign policy with the insistence on war with Russia; the blocking of conservative movements organically arising throughout Europe; and their unwavering support of Israel’s actions.

In fact, the Henry Jackson Society has quite intimate and friendly relations with Israel [p. 35].

In July 2010, the Henry Jackson Society hosted the UK launch of the Friends of Israel Initiative at the House of Commons with Conservative MP Robert Halfon, who at the time was the political director of Conservative Friends of Israel. It was attended by former Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar, former president of the Italian Senate Marcello Pera and British historian and HJS signatory Andrew Roberts – all co-founders of the initiative.[267]

The Friends of Israel Initiative was launched internationally in Paris on 31 May, [268 269] the same day that Israeli troops attacked the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish vessel attempting to break the blockade of Gaza, killing nine (civilian) activists.

In a 17 June 2010 article for The Times, Aznar (who was a board member of News Corporation, the owner of the paper at the time) [2] blamed the ship’s sponsors for the attack, which took place in international waters….

How can this society be trusted to provide any report detailing the results of Israel’s behavior in Gaza? They are complicit partners in Israel’s Zionism.

The HJS also has ties to upper echelon world-banking interests who represent a tiny elite wanting to shepherd a new world order for humanity. Except for arguing about finances and who deserves the credit for organizing functions, they apparently each sleep in the same bed.

This ultimately became the Inclusive Capitalism Initiative, which hosted a conference at the Mansion House in London on 27 May 2014, with keynote speakers including the Prince of Wales, US President Bill Clinton, IMF Director Christine Lagarde and Bank of England Governor Mark Carney. According to Germany’s international broadcaster Deutsche Welle, during the conference: ‘It was claimed that institutional investors and business leaders assembled at the meeting represented companies that together control about 30 per cent of the world's total stock of financial wealth under professional management.’ [329]

The conference was sponsored [3] by the Rockefeller Foundation ($160,000) and Ford Foundation ($150,000), both based in New York;….

In the aftermath of the conference, major differences emerged among its organisers. Lynn Forester de Rothschild sued the HJS for £187,000 claiming breach of trust and fiduciary dut [33] She regarded the conference as her own idea, according to the Evening Standard, which reported that, 'Her claim suggests HJS acted only as “secretariat” and “agents” for the May 27 Conference on Inclusive Capitalism at the Mansion House and Guildhall and says she raised all the funds'. [333]

Over the years, the HJS morphed into a weird polyglot attempting to appeal to both liberals and neo-cons by interbleeding issues with enormous latitude.

By promoting what has been called a ‘generalised suspicion of Muslims…characterised as holding on to an alien culture that, in its opposition to homosexuality and gender equality, threatens core European values’, [389] HJS and Students Rights thus hoped to appeal to liberals – and the strategy has worked well with some secular humanist groups and liberal commentators allying themselves with the group on gender issues.

This is a microcosm of a wider trend. Just as the neoconservative movement created an empowered conservative bloc, Islamophobia today appears to be facilitating a ‘realigned right’ across Europe. [390] And rather than spreading conspiracy theories about the state’s collusion with radical Islam – as is common in parts of the counterjihad movement [391] – the tactics of these types of alliances are to invoke state power to ‘put into place legal and administrative structures that discriminate against Muslims’. [392]

In this way, HJS’s activities increasingly appear to have shifted away from promoting liberal democracy to attacking Islam, both domestically and internationally…. [p. 48]

This is the organization whose report on “inflated and misleading” numbers in Gazan civilian death count we’re supposed to believe? Would you consider them an impartial organization?

In truth, no one can provide a truly accountable number of deaths in Gaz, for in the chaos of war, strife, and starvation, no one can truly know when communication infrastructure is demolished. From PolitiFact, The Poynter Institute:

Early in the conflict, fatality data came from public and private hospitals, where medical workers recorded names, ages, genders and ID numbers of people who died. The information went into an electronic database, according to news reports.

Attacks on hospitals and communications blackouts significantly impacted the quality of data over time, researchers at organizations that track data about armed conflict told us.

On Dec. 11, 2023, the Ministry of Health announced in a statistical digest that it had started incorporating media sources for its fatality figures, said David Adesnik, a senior fellow and research director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a conservative, foreign policy-focused think tank. The ministry did not identify what media sources it was relying on but the proportion of data coming from media accounts increased over time, Adesnik said: "Media sources served as the documentation for more than three-fourths of deaths counted during the first three months of 2024."

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Please note one point. Part of the communications infrastructure had been hospitals. What about those people who never arrived at hospitals? What about the people lying under huge slabs of concrete which can’t be moved? What about the people burned in tents into cinders? What about the people blown apart upon impact? Who reports them? What kind of “reporting system” could Gaza possibly have at this point or even 6-8 months ago?

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Relief Web International describes damage in May 2024:

The speed and extent of the catastrophic damage caused by the war on Gaza have been unparalleled and incomparable in recent times. Since 7 October 2023, more than 50 per cent of all the structures in the Gaza Strip have been destroyed; 360,000 housing units damaged, 5 per cent of the population killed or injured and two million people displaced. Combined methods of remote sensing, using satellite imagery, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and very high resolution aerial imagery, in addition to field work, are essential to test and validate the assessment of damage caused by disasters and wars. They are also essential to detect, with precision, damage that is difficult to see, and to quickly assess the amount of damage, as it was done during the damage assessment undertaken by the World Bank of the Haiti Earthquake disaster in 2010.

A methodological note on the assessment of the physical damage to buildings caused by the war on Gaza (October 2023-March 2024) was prepared by UNESCWA-Statistics, in collaboration with the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), the United Nations UNITAR/UNOSAT unit (UNOSAT) and the Decentralized Damage Mapping Group-University of Oregon (DDMG). The assessment integrates high resolution satellite imagery with official statistics on geolocated data from surveys and censuses in the State of Palestine….

Ideally, we need these kinds of methods and techniques to provide accurate figures on anything within Gaza. There simply is no infrastructure to provide this kind of data in Gaza. Israel, obviously, has no inclination to collect this data.

We do have these estimates from The Guardian:

Gaza’s economy has been left in “utter ruin” by the year-long war between Israel and Hamas, and it would take 350 years to return to its pre-conflict levels, the United Nations has warned.

In a report on the economic costs of the war prepared by its trade and development wing (Unctad), the UN said the fighting since Hamas killed more than 1,200 people in Israel on 7 October last year had devastated the remnants of Gaza’s economy and infrastructure.

The report, presented to last month’s UN general assembly, said economic activity across Gaza – which had been weak before the war – had ground to a halt, apart from minimum humanitarian health and food services provided under conditions of severe water, fuel and electricity shortages, and significant access constraints.

Construction output was down by 96%, agriculture output by 93%, manufacturing by 92% and services sector output by 76%. Meanwhile, unemployment reached 81.7% in the first quarter of 2024, a rate the UN said was likely to worsen or persist for as long as the military operation continued.

“The intense military operations in Gaza resulted in an unprecedented humanitarian, environmental and social catastrophe and propelled Gaza from de-development to utter ruin,” the report said….

“Once a ceasefire is reached, a return to the 2007–2022 growth trend would imply that it would take Gaza 350 years just to restore GDP to its level in 2022.”

Not to be denied, Israel sweeps into Syria

Nonetheless, Israel is on a sweep. No one has stopped their actions in Gaza. They’ve swept into southern Syria since al-Assad’s fall a week ago. They’ve captured and now occupy the tallest mountain top in the region. From CNN:

But it is Israel’s capture of Syria’s highest peak, the Mount Hermon summit, that may prove among the most lasting prizes – though officials have insisted that its occupation is temporary.

“This is the highest place in the region, looking upon Lebanon, upon Syria, Israel,” said Efraim Inbar, director of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security (JISS). “It’s strategically extremely important. There is no substitute for mountains.”…

The summit of Mount Hermon lies in Syria, in a buffer zone that separated Israeli and Syrian forces for fifty years until last weekend, when Israeli troops took control of it. Until Sunday, the summit was demilitarized and patrolled by UN peacekeepers – their highest permanent position in the world.

According to various reports, they carried out anywhere from 300-450 bombings on al-Assad’s military equipment, weapons, and buildings remaining in Syria. Today, we have this report about Israel bombing Tartus where the Russians evidently had one of their bases.

Robin Westerna’s “Seemorerocks” tells us that Israel dropped a bomb which likely blew up a Russian munitions deposit. The shockwave registered on the Richter scale as an earthquake would.

Israel drops colossal 'earthquake bomb' in Syria

Moreover, we learned yesterday that Israel has big plans for the West Bank…evidently their next project. From the Middle East Eye: “Israel to deploy automated weapons in occupied West Bank, report says. Israel media says the move is aimed at guarding illegal settlements, despite proving ineffective in Gaza.”

Could the picture below indicate the “automated weapon” they’ll install? Perhaps the Israelis, as they’ve done in designating bombing targets in Gaza, will use AI by increasing capacity with biometric identification to shoot anyone their data harvesting indicates is Hamas-Hezbollah affiliated?

The trouble with Israel seeding print and social media with “reports” downsizing the numbers killed in Gaza is that nothing can be done for them at this point. The graphic images of too much death, despair, and particularly the children have seared into the public’s mind. Additionally, rational, thinking people know that this isn’t a game of “I say tomato, you say tomatoe” when children are being deliberately shot in the head.

Let’s refresh our memories

A few quips:

• Seymour Hersch before Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza:

The current Israeli war planners are convinced, the insider told me, that the upgraded version of JDAMs with larger warheads would penetrate deep enough underground before detonating - thirty to fifty meters - with the blast and resulting sound wave ‘killing all within one-half mile’ … The insider also said the current planning calls for the JDAMs attack if authorized, to come as early as Sunday or Monday, depending on how the forced expulsion of Gazans from Gaza City and the south proceeds, with a ground invasion to follow immediately," Hersh said on his Substack column

Question: If you target a Hamas leader but your bombs kill all those within 1/2 mile, how many people do you kill?

• Seymour Hersch:

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have every intention of staging in the Gaza Strip something similar to the US destruction of the Japanese city of Hiroshima, only without nuclear weapons, American journalist Seymour Hersh wrote in an article on Substack.

“Gaza City is in the process of being turned into Hiroshima with no nuclear weapons used,” Hersh cited sources as telling him.

Furthermore, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has every intention “to wipe out Hamas,” with little concern for hundreds of thousands of citizens of Gaza that were told to evacuate and move south of the enclave on October 12, underscored Sy Hersh, referencing unnamed intelligence analysts in Washington.

Question: How many people can you kill if you have “little concern” for them?

• WATCH THIS SHORT VIDEO. Residential buildings, Hamad Towers, in Khan Younis being bombed last December.

Question: How many people do you kill in buildings called “residential towers?”

• From Oxfam International January 2023: “Daily death rate in Gaza higher than any other major 21st Century conflict - Oxfam”

Israel’s military is killing Palestinians at an average rate of 250 people a day which exceeds the daily death toll of any other major conflict of recent years, Oxfam said today, as the escalation of hostilities nears its 100th day….

• According to UNOCHA, there were 23,074 reported deaths in Gaza between 7 October 23 and 7 January 24, an average of 250.8 per day and 330 deaths so far in the West Bank.

Answer: If Oxfam’s correct, 250 people/day x 437 days = 109,250 as of December 16, 2024.

• The Nation explains “Why a UN Human Rights Adviser Quit Over Israeli War Crimes”

His name is Craig Mokhiber. He “investigated human rights in Palestine since the 1980s and lived in Gaza as a UN human rights adviser in the 1990s. He also worked through genocides against Tutsis in Rwanda, Muslims in Bosnia, Yazidis in Iraq, and Rohingya in Myanmar. He was the director in the New York Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, where he from 1992 until his resignation on October 28, 2023.”…

He had been hogtied earlier in 2023 when a pogrom had occurred in the West Bank. He finally resigned October 2023 after the Gaza bombings began.

The UN asked me to stay, and I said that I could not remain. In the month of February, there were a series of atrocities on the West Bank, including the pogrom that was carried out in the village of Huwara. I was speaking very publicly, by the way, as I have on human rights violations committed in dozens of countries all around the world and every continent for 32 years at the United Nations. But in this particular case, there was pressure that was brought to bear on the UN in March from Western governments, from Israel lobby groups and others to try to silence the UN. I was very disappointed to see some senior UN officials falling into that trap and allowing themselves to be silenced. And then worse, orders that came down for me to be silent at that moment in my public pronouncements, which was something I wasn’t ready to do. I indicated then that I would intend to be leaving the UN in the coming month. And of course after that, the situation on the ground in Palestine became much worse in October, as we saw this wholesale assault on the civilian population in Gaza. It’s that moment that I penned my letter setting out with great detail what I thought was wrong with our approach to the situation in the Middle East, more generally, the trepidatious pronouncements of senior UN officials, and where I thought we needed to be going in order to actually address the realities of the situation on the ground.

How do you create a reality for Israel in which genocide never occurred? One in which everyone believes? You silence speech. You reiterate with massive digital presence that Israel isn’t at fault. You ally with a group like the Henry Jackson Society.

You’ve seen the credentials for the HJS. Unless you support globalism and neo-con wars, you would do well to regard them with some distrust.

Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza strip. However well they choose to phrase their language or gloss over facts, they are culpable.

These are the records written in eternity.