On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacked Israel during a ceasefire, killing nearly 1,200 men, women, and children. The massacre killed more Jews in a single day than at any time since the Holocaust. Israel retaliated against Hamas with overwhelming military force to uproot the terrorist group’s command and military infrastructure.
Israel’s subsequent two-year campaign in Gaza has become the model for urban combat against an entrenched enemy hiding among the civilian population. While polemicists, progressives, and journalists allege genocide, famine, and other atrocities, the reality is that the death toll of non-combatants is the lowest in world history. The proportion of terrorists to collateral casualties was far lower than even the United States’ actions against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Israel hit targets with precision and enabled the evacuation of more than one million civilians from areas of looming operation. Gaza’s growing population belies claims of genocide. Portly terrorists and celebrating civilians feasting in restaurants and handing out candies belied the fiction of famine.
Still, despite Israel’s success and protection of civilians, diplomats, correspondents, academics, and human rights activists pile on with accusations of genocide and atrocity. The basis for such calumny is the so-called Gaza Health Ministry, a wholly controlled subsidiary of Hamas.
Israel and its supporters may be frustrated that not only political activists but also the United Nations take Hamas claims at face value, but they should be surprised. This is not the first time United Nations malfeasance and journalistic negligence have led to a false conventional wisdom to entrench.
Fear and lack of access explain why so many accept Hamas Health Ministry statistics. Whether for fear of being caught in a crossfire or recognition that questioning, let alone investigating, Hamas numbers is a recipe for a bullet in the kneecap, Hamas monopolizes statistics. They are not the first.
A quarter century ago, Iraq labored under sanctions. While Iraqi President Saddam Hussein siphoned off billions of dollars through a United Nations corruption scheme, his regime complained repeatedly that international sanctions starved children. Many anti-war and progressive organizations embraced his claims at face value. Enter the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). After the Iraqi government refused it permission to independently survey the health of Iraqi children under sanctions, UNICEF chose instead to publish the report utilizing Saddam Hussein’s Ministry of Health’s statistics. The statistics were nonsense, fabricated to depict widespread child malnutrition. This UNICEF report was the origin of the “500,000 children dead” lie that became received wisdom.
A less agenda-driven press, let alone the human rights community, would have stepped back and asked questions: Why was it, if children were starving, that Saddam’s regime was exporting baby formula? While UNICEF chose to accept Saddam’s statistics blindly, in September 2000, the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization published a report in collaboration with the World Health Organization which did conduct independent surveys inside Iraq. It found that half of the Iraqi adult population was overweight and among the leading causes of death were high blood pressure and diabetes, not diseases of the hungry. In hindsight, Hamas simply adopted Saddam’s playbook and outlets from the BBC to the New York Times and organizations from UNICEF to Human Rights Watch to the International Red Cross first fell for the same tricks and then circled the wagons to avoid acknowledging their errors.
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The press, human rights groups, and the U.N. claim to represent truth and lament the decline in public respect they enjoy.
Rather than blame Republicans, introspection is in order: So long as they place polemics above truth and trust Saddam Hussein and Yahya Sinwar over Washington and Jerusalem, they will end up with egg on their face, crying wolf over genocide, perhaps enjoying plaudits from the Ivy League drum circle, while policymakers simply confirm their irrelevance and move on.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.