On January 6, 2009, Hamas accused Israel of deliberately striking a UN school in Jabaliya in the Gaza Strip, killing over 40 Palestinians. “Israeli mortars kill 40 Palestinian refugees,” reported the New York Times. It later became clear that IDF soldiers had been returning fire at attackers nearby who had shot first, and that they had hit combatants but not the school. Further, the IDF’s surveillance showed only a few stretchers had been brought in, casting doubt on the high fatality number. The IDF assessed the Jabaliya fatality figure at 12, nine of whom were terrorists, and asked the Gaza Health Ministry for a list of those killed. The ministry was not accommodating. “We were told that Hamas was hiding the number of dead,” Col. Moshe Levi told the Jerusalem Post when he presented the newspaper with detailed evidence of Hamas fabrications during the war.
Say, if you can’t trust the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry, who can you trust? Huh? The question has been widely asked since Israel was accused last week of killing hundreds at a hospital in Gaza, given that the murder weapon proved tobe a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket and caused a significantly smaller death toll in any case. Media organizations had plenty of egg on their faces for blithely repeating terrorist propaganda. Many of us assumed a lesson might have been learned.
Well, it sure wasn’t learned by the Washington Post. The leading newspaper in the nation’s capital explains that during “conflict coverage, official numbers often provide the only view of casualty levels,” in the words of Adam Taylor, a reporter at the paper. And, hey, Hamas is official, isn’t it?
“Many experts consider figures provided by the [Gaza Health] ministry reliable, given its access, sources and accuracy in past statements,” Taylor informs us. I was eager to hear from these “experts,” considering the the ministry’s notorious unreliability. Taylor doesn’t disappoint. “Everyone uses the figures from the Gaza Health Ministry because those are generally proven to be reliable,” Taylor quotes one Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch.
My friends, if taking the Health Ministry’s word is strike one for the paper’s sourcing, relying on Shakir is strike two. Shakir was literally expelled from Israel four years ago for his ties to the BDS movement, which seeks Israel’s destruction. Does the Washington Post have any sources who aren’t engaged in some effort to abolish the Jewish state?
Never mind all that. Hamas suppresses dissent—even Taylor notes that—but why would Palestinians complain anyway? “The Gaza Health Ministry has continued to perform its core services,” he reports. “Hamas received support in the 2006 elections in part by promising better social services, and some analysts say the group has improved certain areas of access.”
The “some analysts” referenced by Taylor turns out to be a report issued in…2012. For the math-challenged, that’s eleven years ago. And it’s true that, if you squint, this report by Center for Strategic and International Studies did back up that characterization: Hamas-run hospitals increased the number of available beds, it said. Yet even that supposedly monumental achievement isn’t Hamas’s alone. The report made clear that “while Hamas is often credited with efficient bureaucratic management and competency, it could not have managed to administer Gaza’s social services at the same level without the hundreds of millions of dollars it receives in foreign support. That support is crucial for covering the majority of its daily operations, including paying salaries, supplying medicine, and providing fuel and medical equipment.”
I did agree with this line in the CSIS report: “Hamas’s management of the health care system has emphasized cost cutting and efficiency.” Hamas’s habit of using X-ray departments as jails and interrogation wards while military commanders hide in a bunker underneath its main hospital building is certainly efficient.
The truth is, we are repeatedly given reason by Hamas to distrust its wartime claims. Just last year, Hamas “blamed Israel for the deaths of children in Jabaliya in a strike on Gaza,” notes Toby Dershowitz, senior vice president at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “After Israel had assessed that the militant group Palestinian Islamic Jihad was poised to imminently attack Israel, it launched preemptive strikes in self-defense. Only when Israel provided aerial imagery showing the Jabaliya deaths on that day were caused by a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket did some media attempt to reverse course.”
Perhaps instead of seeking to justify putting their trust in a terrorist organization that hasn’t earned it, the Washington Post and other organizations that follow in its path should simply admit Hamas’s ritual manipulation and hesitate to repeat its claims. After all, what would the Gaza Health Ministry think of the inefficiency of having to keep correcting the same reporting?
