A pretty solid column from Bret Stephens at the NY Times. Stephens has spent time covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including in Gaza. That experience has given him some perspective on how Hamas operates and it’s a perspective he thinks more readers should know and more news organizations should keep in mind. Simply put, Gaza is effectively a police state run by Hamas.

He opens with a story about a “fixer” he worked with in Gaza, a Palestinian journalist named Said. Said was paid to help out western journalists like Stephens, taking them around to talk to people, translating for them, generally knowing how to get around and get things done safely. At one point, Said called Stephens in a panic in 2001 over an article which had been published in the Wall Street Journal.

…something I had written in The Wall Street Journal had met with the displeasure of officials in the Palestinian Authority. The goon squad, he said, had paid his family an admonitory visit in their apartment, and he wanted me to take the story down. That was out of the question, I told him. It was never safe for us to work together again.

Police knocking on your door to give you a warning is what happens in a police state. It happens in China all the time.  Dr. Li Wenliang got a visit from the police warning him not to spread “rumors” about the coronavirus. The knock on the door is intended to scare people into line. It keeps everyone afraid which is what the regime wants, a reminder that the government maintains total control.

I’ll leave the media criticism to others. But Western audiences will never grasp the nature of the current conflict until they internalize one central fact. In Israel, as in every other democracy, political and military officials sometimes lie — but journalists hold them to account, tell the stories they want to tell, and don’t live in fear of midnight knocks on the door.

The Palestinian territories, by contrast, are republics of fear — fear of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and of Hamas in Gaza. Palestinians are neither more nor less honest than people elsewhere. But, as in any tyrannical or fanatical regime, those who stray from the approved line put themselves at serious risk.

The fact that people in Gaza live in fear of their government is obviously relevant when major news organizations run headlines based on information gleaned from Hamas-controlled organizations. For instance, how many people died in that hospital blast? The Gaza Health Ministry, which reports to Hamas, offered a series of numbers and eventually settled on 471 deaths. Outside observers say the real figure is maybe half that or maybe much lower, not even 1/4 of that.

Of course any death toll at a hospital is bad but there is a big difference between a few dozen deaths and 471 deaths. Hamas knows big death toll numbers benefit them by putting international pressure on Israel to stop responding to the war Hamas started. They have a big incentive to lie.

During the first major Israel-Hamas war, in 2008 and 2009, Palestinian groups claimed the death toll was mostly civilian, with roughly 1,400 people killed. But a Palestinian doctor working in Gaza’s Shifa hospital told a different story. “The number of deceased stands at no more than 500 to 600,” he said. “Most of them are youths between the ages of 17 to 23 who were recruited to the ranks of Hamas, who sent them to the slaughter,” he said. Tellingly, according to the Israeli news site YNet, “the doctor wished to remain unidentified, out of fear for his life.”

Despite this, you can look around and find lots of stories about the terrible death toll in Gaza right now. US news outlets don’t seem to have learned anything. Here’s the NY Times report published yesterday:

Israel said it had struck more than 400 targets in the past 24 hours — on top of more than 320 a day earlier — in some of the most intense aerial attacks on Gaza in recent days. The Gaza Health Ministry, which is controlled by Hamas, said it had recorded the highest single-day death toll of the war: at least 704 people, killed in dozens of strikes on homes, a refugee camp and other places. It was not possible to verify the toll independently.

Another big round number of deaths. The Times admits it came essentially from Hamas and that it can’t verify the numbers. And yet, they continue to publish them. Here’s a CBS News report from today. [emphasis added]

More than 700 people were killed in Israeli airstrikes in Gaza in just 24 hours Tuesday, according to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health. If accurate, it would be the deadliest day in Gaza since the war began.

If accurate…But what are the chances it’s accurate? It took Israel a full week to identify and count around 1,400 bodies killed in the initial attack. But the Gaza Health Ministry, which is operating in a bombed out, half vacant city with no electricity can identify exactly 756 bodies in a matter of hours? Here’s the Washington Post from this morning.

Some 756 people in Gaza have been killed in Israeli strikes in the past day, Gaza’s Health Ministry said Wednesday, increasingthe total death toll in the enclave since the war began Oct. 7 to 6,546. Palestinian health officials said the total number of people killed includes 2,704 children.

An additional 17,000 people have been injured, the ministry said in updates posted to Telegram…

The Washington Post, like other news organizations, the United Nations and other international institutions, cannot independently verify death tolls in the war between Israel and Hamas.

If you click that link you’ll be directed to a story which admits these figures come from a Hamas controlled entity and can’t be verified. This is just irresponsible and all of the major news outlets who do it should stop.

Update: Another example of the Palestinian spin machine from AG Hamilton. Note his first tweet says 2022 but he later corrected that this was 2002.

Israel decided they had no choice but to go into the camp, which militants had boob-trapped and prepared for a battle. Israel went in on April 2nd. By April 7th, Palestinians were claiming over 500 dead. In the next week, they would raise that number to thousands.

— AG (@AGHamilton29) October 25, 2023

So overnight the death count went from 900+ civilians to 53, & mostly militants. 23 Israeli soldiers were also killed. Now the thing about the Jenin battle is bc it was in the West Bank, the numbers could be verified.

— AG (@AGHamilton29) October 25, 2023

News orgs are admittedly in a tough position with Gaza bc there are no other sources and people are clearly dying, but taking the Hamas numbers as if they are real or not at least informing their audience the numbers come from Hamas, is clearly irresponsible & harmful.

— AG (@AGHamilton29) October 25, 2023

Another point this raises: Israel has been targeting Hamas for two weeks. How many of those killed in the strikes were Hamas fighters? Hamas doesn’t say anything about that. They’d rather we believe 100% of those killed were civilians. Many of the actual dead (whatever those numbers are) are terrorists who declared war on Israel.