Earlier this week, I described how the Washington Post relies on death counts provided by Hamas and vouches for their credibility, claiming that the Hamas-controlled Gaza health ministry “has been a reliable source of data on casualties in the past.” I pointed out that the death count recently provided by that ministry from a rocket that landed in a hospital parking lot was five times greater than what the Post itself reported. In addition, the ministry falsely claimed that the rocket hit the hospital itself and that it was launched from Israel.
So much for the reliability of the Gaza ministry of health.
Why, then, does the Post continue to rely on that Hamas-controlled ministry for death tolls? I think it’s because the Post is anti-Israel.
Others must suspect the same thing because in this article the Post tries to explain itself. As I’ll try to show below, the Post’s explanation, written by Adam Taylor, succeeds only in confirming its sympathy for Hamas and its antipathy for the Jewish state.
Here is the Post’s excuse for citing and vouching for Hamas’ numbers:
In conflict coverage, official numbers often provide the only view of casualty levels. In the war in Ukraine, The Post reports death tolls issued by official Ukrainian and Russian sources. . . .
The Post has also cited figures from the Israeli government that say over 1,400 people were killed in the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7.
By equating Hamas with Israel, Ukraine, and Russia, the Post has “normalized” terrorists (to borrow a favorite verb of the left during the Trump presidency). It treats an outfit that’s committed to destroying Israel — one that launched a sneak attack in which it butchered more than 1,000 civilians — as deserving the same deference accorded to the governments of Israel and Ukraine. In doing so, the Post demonstrates its sympathy for Hamas.
The Post continues:
International organizations including the United Nations usually rely on these same figures as they are seen as the best available.
The Post thus tries to hide behind the U.N. But given that body’s virulent anti-Israeli views — it rejected a resolution condemning the October 7 massacre and it just named Iran to head its human rights forum — this gambit confirms the Post’s anti-Israel bias.
The Post didn’t just cite figures provided by Hamas, it vouched for their past reliability. Here’s how the Post justifies this:
“Everyone uses the figures from the Gaza Health Ministry because those are generally proven to be reliable,” said Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch. “In the times in which we have done our own verification of numbers for particular strikes, I’m not aware of any time which there’s been some major discrepancy.
But Shakir hates Israel. He has been a consistent supporter of a one-state framework and advocate for BDS (boycotts, divestment, sanctions) campaigns against Israel. A few years ago, Israel deported Shakir for his BDS activity, a move upheld by Israel’s leftist Supreme Court. For more on his record of anti-Israel declarations and activities, go here.
By vouching for Shakir, the Post confirms its anti-Israel bias.
Finally, what about the fact that the Post itself reported a death toll for the parking lot explosion that was around one-fifth of that provided by the oh-so-reliable Gaza health ministry? The Post’s Taylor tries to brush this off by saying “official accounts sometimes differ.”
Now, the Post is putting the credibility of Hamas on par with that of the U.S. government, which said the death toll was “at the low end of the 100-300 spectrum.” Yes, official accounts sometimes differ. But when they differ by this much, this is not a good-faith counting disparity. One of the parties is lying.
Speaking for the Post, Adan Taylor is saying, in effect, that the liar is as likely to be the U.S. government as it is Hamas, a terrorist organization.
The Post offers no defense for the Gaza health ministry’s lie that the rocket hit the hospital, rather than the parking lot. As for the ministry’s claim that the rocket came from Israel, Taylor says:
The Health Ministry blamed an Israeli strike for the deaths at the hospital. The Israeli government, however, has said it was not responsible and suggested that a misfired Palestinian rocket hit the site, an assessment supported by the United States.
But the Israeli government’s statement isn’t just supported by the U.S. As I showed in my previous post on this subject, it is supported by the analysis of news outlets including CNN and the Post. It is also supported by a mountain of publicly available evidence.
Keep in mind, too, that the Post obsessively labels much of what Donald Trump says as “false.” But it can’t bring itself to label claims by Hamas false, even after our government finds them to be flatly incorrect and even after Joe Biden says “I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.”
Because the Gaza health ministry lied so egregiously about the parking lot incident, the Post has no excuse for giving any weight to anything that propaganda organ says. That the Post, instead, tells its readers that the ministry has been reliable in the past, shows that the paper is anti-Israel and pro-Israel’s enemies— just like Omar Shakir on whose word it also relies.
You are a master of understatement in this article!
Not so much "anti Israel" as actively pro Nazi.