#fake hamas casualty report

[eretzyisrael]

Source

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

BY: GILEAD INI

Before looking at specific examples of disinformation by the “critics,” as the Times and NPR calls them, we should address a few broader points.

Despite evidence of rape, those defending Hamas from charges of sexual violence point to a lack of forensic evidence — the kind that might be revealed at the denouement of a television crime show. Indeed, Israel’s frontier with Gaza on and after Oct 7 was less untouched crime scene and more battlefield and disaster zone.

But this is neither exonerating nor unusual. “There is very much what’s known as the CSI effect, where there is a perception that without forensic evidence or DNA, then you don’t have a case,” an expert on sexual violence in conflict zones told NPR. “And that’s just patently not true.”

In this case, the full CSI treatment was impracticable. “As is common in war, collection of physical evidence was hindered by ongoing combat and a large, chaotic crime scene,” NPR reported.

With limited resources and such a large-scale attack, compromises were necessary, journalist Carrie Keller-Lynn explained. “Instead of going through CSI, which would make it possible to produce evidence of crimes, the bodies are being processed through the disaster victim identification (DVI) track, as is common for mass casualty events,” she reported. Or as the UN mission put it, there was a “prioritization of rescue operations and the recovery, identification, and burial of the deceased in accordance with religious practices, over the collection of forensic evidence.” (The mission noted additional factors, too, that hindered the collection of forensic examination. See paragraph 46 of its report.)

The deniers had also pointed to lack of testimony by victims — a puzzling defense in the context of this story, where survivors describe women raped then murdered; where recovery workers noted naked and bound corpses; and where released hostages say those still in captivity had said they were sexually assaulted. Which category of those victims, exactly, would the deniers expect to have heard from? (When a hostage did eventually speak out about being sexually assaulted, the self-appointed investigators were not particularly interested, or worse, dismissed her account.)

None of this means every testimony is beyond reproach. Just as the record of 9/11 was contaminated by multiple false accounts and fake survivors, likewise after 10/7 false accounts were reported by pretenders, and some unfounded atrocity charges were shared, believed, and repeated. The “critics” did not miss the opportunity to capitalize on these inaccurate accounts in order to push the idea, through innuendo or explicit denial, that every witness of rape and every first responder account of sexually abused bodies are fake.

The Critics

NPR’s story about “critics” of a New York Times piece on sexual violence repeatedly cites The Intercept.

Once of many acknowledgements by The Intercept that its claims come from the further fringes.

And across The Intercept’s incessant efforts to discredit those shining a light on Palestinian sexual violence, its reporters cite Mondoweiss, Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada, and Max Blumenthal of Grayzone.

It is an echo chamber of Hamas apologia — invariably, one story links to identical accusations by the others, which link back to similar pieces by the rest. The common theme, other then denial, is the extremism of its participants.

Consider, most relevantly, their response to the Oct 7 massacre:

A writer for the Intercept, at least, grants that the attack was “horrifying” — though this was in a post whose argument was that we shouldn’t view it as horrifying.

Others are less subtle. Denier Ali Abunimah, for example, was self-evidently delighted by the slaughter of civilians in Israel. He not only defended the attack, calling it “just”; not only insisted we shouldn’t feel bad about it (this just minutes after he posted video of elderly female hostage paraded and taunted on video); but also viciously attacked those — including critics of Israel — who would dare share any sympathy for the victims of the mass slaughter of Jews.

Mondoweiss summarized the deadliest day in Jewish history since the Holocaust with an announcement that “Gazans have broken out of their open air prison imposed by Israel and launched an elaborate surprise attack on their occupier,” while pooh-poohing the idea that Hamas had started a war. As the extent of the atrocities became apparent, Mondoweiss’s defenses of the assault grew more emphatic. On Oct. 8, its culture editor Muhammed El-Kurd insisted the attack was a cause for “celebration.” On Oct. 9, it published a piece insisting we “must shout our support for the resistance from our rooftops.”

Max Blumenthal minimized Hamas’s slaughter as ”guerrilla bands bursting out of a besieged ghetto with homemade weapons.” In response to a Twitter post noting that at its attack on a music festival Hamas “began shooting those in attendance,” Blumenthal mocked the victims and justified their slaughter.

The motivation for their leap to action at the first accusation of rape, then, is as simple as it seems: It is born of sympathy for Hamas.

[thatdebaterguy]

Coming back from a trip to Austria, and oh boy I've discovered some rather interesting things

Just remember the part where it says trustworthy then read this

So, the terrorist owned group counting the deaths in Gaza, which the mainstream media and WHO have been happy to accept as the truth without third party verification, is now reporting that possibly up to a third of their entire calculation of the death toll is inflated and incorrect. Meanwhile, Israel and the US intelligence estimate between 10-12k Hamas fighters have died in this war. If the previous figure was about 33k, and is now down to 22k, with 10-12k being soldiers, it's around a 50-50 civilian military casualty ratio, which in urban warfare in the modern age against terrorists who have years worth of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of tunnels and infrastructure running through buildings and under the entire city, is a literal miracle.

It's true that because of the unlikeliness of a 50-50 ratio, I personally think not all of those 11k are falsified or inflated, however it's very likely a large amount of them are, since Hamas have been using global perception of Israel as a means to cut off its military aid since day one, and have been manipulating the divides in the west to stoke up support for their war. The question is now, if they can so easily fool WHO into believing their now falsified and inflated statistics, then what else is fake? Are there less or more fighters than we fought? How many of these clips of civilians dying are false? How many of these stories are manufactured to paint a bad picture of Israel? Once you're caught in a lie like this, your reliability, which was near zero to begin with, becomes undoubtedly tarnished permanently.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Abraham Wyner

Published: Mar 7, 2024

The number of civilian casualties in Gaza has been at the center of international attention since the start of the war. The main source for the data has been the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, which now claims more than 30,000 dead, the majority of which it says are children and women. Recently, the Biden administration lent legitimacy to Hamas’ figure. When asked at a House Armed Services Committee hearing last week how many Palestinian women and children have been killed since Oct. 7, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said the number was “over 25,000.” The Pentagon quickly clarified that the secretary “was citing an estimate from the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry.” President Biden himself had earlier cited this figure, asserting that “too many, too many of the over 27,000 Palestinians killed in this conflict have been innocent civilians and children, including thousands of children.” The White House also explained that the president “was referring to publicly available data about the total number of casualties.”

Here’s the problem with this data: The numbers are not real. That much is obvious to anyone who understands how naturally occurring numbers work. The casualties are not overwhelmingly women and children, and the majority may be Hamas fighters.

If Hamas’ numbers are faked or fraudulent in some way, there may be evidence in the numbers themselves that can demonstrate it. While there is not much data available, there is a little, and it is enough: From Oct. 26 until Nov. 10, 2023, the Gaza Health Ministry released daily casualty figures that include both a total number and a specific number of women and children.

The first place to look is the reported “total” number of deaths. The graph of total deaths by date is increasing with almost metronomical linearity, as the graph in Figure 1 reveals.

[ The graph reveals an extremely regular increase in casualties over the period. Data aggregated by the author and provided by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), based on Gaza MoH figures. ]

This regularity is almost surely not real. One would expect quite a bit of variation day to day. In fact, the daily reported casualty count over this period averages 270 plus or minus about 15%. This is strikingly little variation. There should be days with twice the average or more and others with half or less. Perhaps what is happening is the Gaza ministry is releasing fake daily numbers that vary too little because they do not have a clear understanding of the behavior of naturally occurring numbers. Unfortunately, verified control data is not available to formally test this conclusion, but the details of the daily counts render the numbers suspicious.

Similarly, we should see variation in the number of child casualties that tracks the variation in the number of women. This is because the daily variation in death counts is caused by the variation in the number of strikes on residential buildings and tunnels which should result in considerable variability in the totals but less variation in the percentage of deaths across groups. This is a basic statistical fact about chance variability. Consequently, on the days with many women casualties there should be large numbers of children casualties, and on the days when just a few women are reported to have been killed, just a few children should be reported. This relationship can be measured and quantified by the R-square (R2 ) statistic that measures how correlated the daily casualty count for women is with the daily casualty count for children. If the numbers were real, we would expect R2 to be substantively larger than 0, tending closer to 1.0. But R2 is .017 which is statistically and substantively not different from 0.

[ The daily number of children reported to have been killed is totally unrelated to the number of women reported. The R2 is .017 and the relationship is statistically and substantively insignificant. ]

This lack of correlation is the second circumstantial piece of evidence suggesting the numbers are not real. But there is more. The daily number of women casualties should be highly correlated with the number of non-women and non-children (i.e., men) reported. Again, this is expected because of the nature of battle. The ebbs and flows of the bombings and attacks by Israel should cause the daily count to move together. But that is not what the data show. Not only is there not a positive correlation, there is a strong negative correlation, which makes no sense at all and establishes the third piece of evidence that the numbers are not real.

[ The correlation between the daily men and daily women death count is absurdly strong and negative (p-value < .0001). ]

Consider some further anomalies in the data: First, the death count reported on Oct. 29 contradicts the numbers reported on the 28th, insofar as they imply that 26 men came back to life. This can happen because of misattribution or just reporting error. There are a few other days where the numbers of men are reported to be near 0. If these were just reporting errors, then on those days where the death count for men appears to be in error, the women’s count should be typical, at least on average. But it turns out that on the three days when the men’s count is near zero, suggesting an error, the women’s count is high. In fact, the three highest daily women casualty count occurs on those three days.

[ There are three days where the male casualty count is close to 0. These three days correspond to the three highest daily women’s casualty count. ]

Taken together, what does this all imply? While the evidence is not dispositive, it is highly suggestive that a process unconnected or loosely connected to reality was used to report the numbers. Most likely, the Hamas ministry settled on a daily total arbitrarily. We know this because the daily totals increase too consistently to be real. Then they assigned about 70% of the total to be women and children, splitting that amount randomly from day to day. Then they in-filled the number of men as set by the predetermined total. This explains all the data observed.

There are other obvious red flags. The Gaza Health Ministry has consistently claimed that about 70% of the casualties are women or children. This total is far higher than the numbers reported in earlier conflicts with Israel. Another red flag, raised by Salo Aizenberg and written about extensively, is that if 70% of the casualties are women and children and 25% of the population is adult male, then either Israel is not successfully eliminating Hamas fighters or adult male casualty counts are extremely low. This by itself strongly suggests that the numbers are at a minimum grossly inaccurate and quite probably outright faked. Finally, on Feb. 15, Hamas admitted to losing 6,000 of its fighters, which represents more than 20% of the total number of casualties reported.

Taken together, Hamas is reporting not only that 70% of casualties are women and children but also that 20% are fighters. This is not possible unless Israel is somehow not killing noncombatant men, or else Hamas is claiming that almost all the men in Gaza are Hamas fighters.

Are there better numbers? Some objective commentators have acknowledged Hamas’ numbers in previous battles with Israel to be roughly accurate. Nevertheless, this war is wholly unlike its predecessors in scale or scope; international observers who were able to monitor previous wars are now completely absent, so the past can’t be assumed to be a reliable guide. The fog of war is especially thick in Gaza, making it impossible to quickly determine civilian death totals with any accuracy. Not only do official Palestinian death counts fail to differentiate soldiers from children, but Hamas also blames all deaths on Israel even if caused by Hamas’ own misfired rockets, accidental explosions, deliberate killings, or internal battles. One group of researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health compared Hamas reports to data on UNRWA workers. They argued that because the death rates were approximately similar, Hamas’ numbers must not be inflated. But their argument relied on a crucial and unverified assumption: that UNRWA workers are not disproportionately more likely to be killed than the general population. That premise exploded when it was uncovered that a sizable fraction of UNRWA workers are affiliated with Hamas. Some were even exposed as having participated in the Oct. 7 massacre itself.

The truth can’t yet be known and probably never will be. The total civilian casualty count is likely to be extremely overstated. Israel estimates that at least 12,000 fighters have been killed. If that number proves to be even reasonably accurate, then the ratio of noncombatant casualties to combatants is remarkably low: at most 1.4 to 1 and perhaps as low as 1 to 1. By historical standards of urban warfare, where combatants are embedded above and below into civilian population centers, this is a remarkable and successful effort to prevent unnecessary loss of life while fighting an implacable enemy that protects itself with civilians.

The data used in the article can be found here, with thanks to Salo Aizenberg who helped check and correct these numbers.

-

Abraham Wyner is Professor of Statistics and Data Science at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Faculty Co-Director of the Wharton Sports Analytics and Business Initiative.

==

The Islamic supremacist terrorist organization lied?

Part of the rampant antisemitism is how "news" outlets simply accept Hamas' claims and parrot them back uncritically.

[never-quite-buried]

A live-action simulation game allowing Israelis to role play as Israeli agents fighting in Gaza's al-Shifa hospital is provoking heated online reactions.

"Fauda: Explosive Lab" is an "escape room" in Tel Aviv, Israel, based on the controversial Israeli Netflix show Fauda. Participants in the game pay to pretend to be Israeli agents sent to Gaza

The game requires them to disguise themselves as Palestinians and make their way to a set that emulates Gaza's al-Shifa hospital.

In a fictional version of the hospital's emergency room, the players use pretend guns to shoot at fake Palestinian fighters attacking them through the windows.

From there, the players must enter a tunnel below the mock al-Shifa, where their mission is to neutralise a chemical bomb bound for Tel Aviv.

The real al-Shifa hospital in the Gaza Strip was subject to a days-long Israeli siege in November that led to numerous civilian casualties, including the deaths of four babies.

The hospital has since faced more attacks. According to a Doctors Without Borders report in late January, the hospital is "badly damaged and barely functional".

Although the Israeli military has claimed since October that Hamas maintained a command and control centre below al-Shifa, it has failed to prove it.

Last week, the International Committee of the Red Cross warned of a "catastrophic" healthcare situation in the Gaza Strip, with only three functional hospitals left in the besieged enclave.

But in Tel Aviv, al-Shifa hospital has become a source of entertainment.

Israelis are "wanting to kick some Arabs' ass", said Arik Turkenich, the businessman behind the popular escape room.

He opened the escape room in 2016 after Fauda debuted on Netflix, but reported that business has been booming since January, with most customers choosing to play the game set in al-Shifa hospital over others.

Visitors to the escape room, Turkenich said, have included Israelis who were evacuated from near the Lebanese border, a unit of Israeli soldiers in uniform, and even a soldier who had recently returned from Gaza on his first night out with his wife.

Turkenich told Forward that he always ensures players complete the mission and win the game.

"Everyone in Israel thinks they're so smart and they, you know, blame the operator if they don't win."

A user on social media platform X, formerly Twitter, slammed the escape room, writing: "There's a lot to say about a start-up culture that continually innovates new grotesques."

[sh0rtins0mniac]

"What can be said for certain is that Hamas-produced statistics are inconsistent, imprecise, and appear to have been systematically manipulated to downplay the number of militants killed and to exaggerate the proportion of noncombatants confirmed as dead," the report concludes. (Source: The Jerusalem Post)

Several reports worth reading if you want to understand how Hamas lies about the casulty figures.

[secular-jew]

How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers; The evidence is in their own poorly fabricated figures

By Abraham Wyner, March 6, 2024

The number of civilian casualties in Gaza has been at the center of international attention since the start of the war. The main source for the data has been the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, which now claims more than 30,000 dead, the majority of which it says are children and women. Recently, the Biden administration lent legitimacy to Hamas’ figure. When asked at a House Armed Services Committee hearing last week how many Palestinian women and children have been killed since Oct. 7, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said the number was “over 25,000.” The Pentagon quickly clarified that the secretary “was citing an estimate from the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry.” President Biden himself had earlier cited this figure, asserting that “too many, too many of the over 27,000 Palestinians killed in this conflict have been innocent civilians and children, including thousands of children.” The White House also explained that the president “was referring to publicly available data about the total number of casualties.”

Here’s the problem with this data: The numbers are not real. That much is obvious to anyone who understands how naturally occurring numbers work. The casualties are not overwhelmingly women and children, and the majority may be Hamas fighters.

If Hamas’ numbers are faked or fraudulent in some way, there may be evidence in the numbers themselves that can demonstrate it. While there is not much data available, there is a little, and it is enough: From Oct. 26 until Nov. 10, 2023, the Gaza Health Ministry released daily casualty figures that include both a total number and a specific number of women and children.

The first place to look is the reported “total” number of deaths. The graph of total deaths by date is increasing with almost metronomical linearity, as the graph in Figure 1 reveals.

The graph reveals an extremely regular increase in casualties over the period. Data aggregated by the author and provided by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), based on Gaza MoH figures.

This regularity is almost surely not real. One would expect quite a bit of variation day to day. In fact, the daily reported casualty count over this period averages 270 plus or minus about 15%. This is strikingly little variation. There should be days with twice the average or more and others with half or less. Perhaps what is happening is the Gaza ministry is releasing fake daily numbers that vary too little because they do not have a clear understanding of the behavior of naturally occurring numbers. Unfortunately, verified control data is not available to formally test this conclusion, but the details of the daily counts render the numbers suspicious.

Similarly, we should see variation in the number of child casualties that tracks the variation in the number of women. This is because the daily variation in death counts is caused by the variation in the number of strikes on residential buildings and tunnels which should result in considerable variability in the totals but less variation in the percentage of deaths across groups. This is a basic statistical fact about chance variability. Consequently, on the days with many women casualties there should be large numbers of children casualties, and on the days when just a few women are reported to have been killed, just a few children should be reported. This relationship can be measured and quantified by the R-square (R2 ) statistic that measures how correlated the daily casualty count for women is with the daily casualty count for children. If the numbers were real, we would expect R2 to be substantively larger than 0, tending closer to 1.0. But R2 is .017 which is statistically and substantively not different from 0.

This lack of correlation is the second circumstantial piece of evidence suggesting the numbers are not real. But there is more. The daily number of women casualties should be highly correlated with the number of non-women and non-children (i.e., men) reported. Again, this is expected because of the nature of battle. The ebbs and flows of the bombings and attacks by Israel should cause the daily count to move together. But that is not what the data show. Not only is there not a positive correlation, there is a strong negative correlation, which makes no sense at all and establishes the third piece of evidence that the numbers are not real.

Consider some further anomalies in the data: First, the death count reported on Oct. 29 contradicts the numbers reported on the 28th, insofar as they imply that 26 men came back to life. This can happen because of misattribution or just reporting error. There are a few other days where the numbers of men are reported to be near 0. If these were just reporting errors, then on those days where the death count for men appears to be in error, the women’s count should be typical, at least on average. But it turns out that on the three days when the men’s count is near zero, suggesting an error, the women’s count is high. In fact, the three highest daily women casualty count occurs on those three days.

Taken together, what does this all imply? While the evidence is not dispositive, it is highly suggestive that a process unconnected or loosely connected to reality was used to report the numbers. Most likely, the Hamas ministry settled on a daily total arbitrarily. We know this because the daily totals increase too consistently to be real. Then they assigned about 70% of the total to be women and children, splitting that amount randomly from day to day. Then they in-filled the number of men as set by the predetermined total. This explains all the data observed.

There are other obvious red flags. The Gaza Health Ministry has consistently claimed that about 70% of the casualties are women or children. This total is far higher than the numbers reported in earlier conflicts with Israel. Another red flag, raised by Salo Aizenberg and written about extensively, is that if 70% of the casualties are women and children and 25% of the population is adult male, then either Israel is not successfully eliminating Hamas fighters or adult male casualty counts are extremely low. This by itself strongly suggests that the numbers are at a minimum grossly inaccurate and quite probably outright faked. Finally, on Feb. 15, Hamas admitted to losing 6,000 of its fighters, which represents more than 20% of the total number of casualties reported.

Taken together, Hamas is reporting not only that 70% of casualties are women and children but also that 20% are fighters. This is not possible unless Israel is somehow not killing noncombatant men, or else Hamas is claiming that almost all the men in Gaza are Hamas fighters.

Are there better numbers? Some objective commentators have acknowledged Hamas’ numbers in previous battles with Israel to be roughly accurate. Nevertheless, this war is wholly unlike its predecessors in scale or scope; international observers who were able to monitor previous wars are now completely absent, so the past can’t be assumed to be a reliable guide. The fog of war is especially thick in Gaza, making it impossible to quickly determine civilian death totals with any accuracy. Not only do official Palestinian death counts fail to differentiate soldiers from children, but Hamas also blames all deaths on Israel even if caused by Hamas’ own misfired rockets, accidental explosions, deliberate killings, or internal battles. One group of researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health compared Hamas reports to data on UNRWA workers. They argued that because the death rates were approximately similar, Hamas’ numbers must not be inflated. But their argument relied on a crucial and unverified assumption: that UNRWA workers are not disproportionately more likely to be killed than the general population. That premise exploded when it was uncovered that a sizable fraction of UNRWA workers are affiliated with Hamas. Some were even exposed as having participated in the Oct. 7 massacre itself.

The truth can’t yet be known and probably never will be. The total civilian casualty count is likely to be extremely overstated. Israel estimates that at least 12,000 fighters have been killed. If that number proves to be even reasonably accurate, then the ratio of noncombatant casualties to combatants is remarkably low: at most 1.4 to 1 and perhaps as low as 1 to 1. By historical standards of urban warfare, where combatants are embedded above and below into civilian population centers, this is a remarkable and successful effort to prevent unnecessary loss of life while fighting an implacable enemy that protects itself with civilians.

[mariacallous]

The war in the Middle East is a laboratory for new means of spreading fake news. Propagandists across the world are watching and learning. This year will see democracy’s biggest test: more than two billion people across 50 countries are expected to go to the polls. And a fair proportion of them will be on the receiving end of disinformation techniques refined in Gaza.

The extent of the lying is breathtaking. The BBC’s Verify unit says it has seen nothing to compare to the ‘volume of dehumanising rhetoric posted during this war’.  Eliot Higgins, founder of the investigative website Bellingcat says the level of disinformation in the Israeli-Gaza war is ‘unique to this conflict’.  The Israel and US based security company Cyabra, which monitors fake news on social media, adds that about 20 percent of accounts participating in the online conversation about the war in the days after 7 October were fake. On social media, X (the bin fire formerly known as Twitter) and TikTok were the favourite sites for disinformation, as you would expect.

The explosion of lying reflects a grim truth: for state and private actors, it has never been cheaper or easier to establish credible sock puppets, and then order bot armies to spread falsehoods.  I could look at horrible  claims that a Palestinian mother was just pretending to cradle her dead baby (see picture above), or that Israelis giving accounts of their sufferings at the hands of Hamas were just actors.

However, to show the extent of the new world of lies I want to return to the story I covered last week: the fake news that an advertising campaign by Zara was somehow mocking or exploiting the war-ravaged people of Gaza. Like the QAnon and Pizzagate conspiracy theories, the story matters more than the usual online rubbish because it was a lie with measurable consequences.

Across the world, pro-Palestinian protestors targeted Zara stores. In the US, Canada, Spain, and Sweden, they vandalised them. A video on social media showed that disgusted customers had thrown piles of clothes in front of the Zara store in Times Square, New York. Or at least so the accompanying propaganda claimed.  The video turned out to be footage of an old protest against another brand.  

As I said at the time, the demonstrations showed the madness of crowds in action. They decided to hate a clothing chain that had done nothing to justify their rage. Zara’s agency shot the ad campaign long before Hamas attacked Israel. No one in the photo shoot resembled a soldier or a casualty of war. The pictures showed a model in a sculptor’s studio posing with a mannequin, which was clearly not meant to refer to the corpses of slain Palestinians

And yet even after Zara apologised for an imaginary offence and withdrew the ads, demonstrators continued to target the company. Only a few days ago, they closed the Zara  store at the Trafford Centre in Manchester.  

But I only told half the story. The truth was that much of the rage was confected.

Cyabra uses machine learning scanners to study social media sites and identify fake accounts. They process scores of clues: whether the account is posting 24/7, whether it is posting in multiple languages. The company scanned X, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook, and noticed that Zara was initially criticized for being oblivious to the war and its victims. But the conversations quickly adopted a conspiratorial tone, and you could guess that someone was raising the stakes by looking at the trending hashtags

What began with the hashtag ‘#BoycottZara’ turned to the false ‘#Zara_is_a_zionist_brand,’ and  the frankly mad ‘#ZaraSupportsGenocide.’

Faced with what it thought was genuine anger, Zara pulled the campaign. The BBC, the Guardian, Business Insider  and scores of other news sites reported the climbdown and treated the allegations that Zara was exploiting Palestinian suffering seriously.

When they did, they missed the role of well-resourced and malicious actors. Cyabra said that 39% of the profiles that interacted with Zara were, in fact, fake.  The bots were also far more active than real protestors, it found.

Bots ‘were prominently pushing the hashtags “#Zara_is_a_Zionist_brand” and “#ZaraSupportsGenocide,” the security firm said. ‘They were actively engaged in conversations about the Israel-Hamas war, making sure to regularly tag Zara and interact with the brand while advocating a boycott.’ They were giving protests against Israel more weight, by turning then into demonstrations against the evils of global capitalism.

Journalists covering the story had no way of knowing this. They and Zara did not have the tech to analyse tens of thousands of social media accounts, and nor did their readers and viewers. Suppose they did. Suppose the media reported that, while there were undoubtedly real people who disapproved of Zara’ photoshoot, almost four out of ten of the accounts attacking the firm were fake, and looked as if they were part of a coordinated influence operations campaign possibly run by Iran or Russia.

Exposure would make all the difference, as would the exposure of any other campaign boosted by malicious actors. If readers suspect a trick, they will be on guard.

It is about to get significantly harder for readers and journalists to realise that they are being tricked. For Gaza is also showing that the quality of the lying is increasing as fast as the quantity of lies.

We are in the very early days of an artificial intelligence (AI) revolution which presages an anarchic future for open democracies. Put simply, the fake news AI creates is more believable. AI can tailor the messages from social media accounts so they appeal to a precise target audience.  Until now, targeting has been a difficulty from propagandists. If they wanted to spread conspiracy theories to, say white working-class men, they needed a different tone and vocabulary than if they were targeting wealthy retirees. A Russian propagandist may well not know how to do that.  

Campaigns to persuade US Republicans to abandon Ukraine need to be in authentic American English not British or international English.  ChatGPT can now translate propaganda into the required dialect in seconds and ensure that it doesn’t sound as if the message was composed in a Petersburg basement.

What applies to words, applies to images. In the past, bad actors creating automated profiles at bot farms had to use generic stock images for profile pictures, or steal a real person’s photo and risk being caught. Today AI image generators give them what they need.

Rafi Mendelsohn, marketing vice president Cyabra, described an exponential process to me. Tactics used to twist elections are applied to war zones, refined, expanded, and then sent back to be used to influence the next political campaign.

What should we do? Can we ban TikTok, because the Chinese Communist Party exploits it? Should Western governments build their own troll farms?  Should the security services monitor social media and issue fake news warnings? It’s not that western democracies do not know how to answer these questions, we barely know how to ask them.

When the security services are warning that by 2025 generative AI could be ‘used to assemble knowledge on physical attacks by non-state violent actors, including for chemical, biological and radiological weapons,’ we are in a new world.  It strikes me as a world that Western democracies with their liberal protections for freedom of speech find strange and baffling, but one in which the West’s dictatorial enemies feel entirely at home.

[sanctiphera]

Reposting Hamas propaganda doesn’t instantly make it true.

Relying on a terrorist group to provide figures on a conflict should cause some degree of suspicion over their accuracy. This hasn’t stopped media organisations and world leaders from repeating Hamas-generated figures every day since 7 October 2023.

A report released earlier, however, shows that the official civilian death toll reported by Hamas is “statistically impossible”.

The low level of male casualties reported is inconsistent with a report last month that Hamas lost 6,000 of its fighters, which represents more than 20% of the total number of casualties reported.

If 70% of casualties are women and children as Hamas has reported, then “Israel is somehow not killing noncombatant men, or else Hamas is claiming that almost all the men in Gaza are Hamas fighters.”

[isorottatime]

There is no anger because it didn’t happen

https://www.france24.com/en/tv-shows/truth-or-fake/20231011-the-saint-porphyrios-orthodox-church-in-gaza-was-not-hit-by-israeli-airstrikes

anon's link

all in reference to this post

but you're right, you can't verify the images in the actual post. your video is correct in what it's debunking-- claims from oct 9-- but the church was then bombed 10 days later.

[eretzyisrael]

by Jake Wallis Simons

Therefore, the number of women and children killed was likely grossly exaggerated. If that is the case – if, as Prof Wyner suggests, “the casualties are not overwhelmingly women and children, and the majority may be Hamas fighters” – where does that leave western outrage? Has the West fallen victim to a monstrous con?

The true ratio of civilian casualties to combatants is likely to be exceptionally low, “at most 1.4 to 1 and perhaps as low as 1 to 1”. This, Prof Wyner says, is a “successful effort to prevent unnecessary loss of life while fighting an implacable enemy that protects itself with civilians”.

By rights, if the central pillar of the anti-Israel edifice has been discredited, the whole structure should come tumbling down. But don’t hold your breath. The reason why Hamas’s dodgy data is so easily believed is confirmation bias. The drip-drip of Israelophobic propaganda over the years has created a powerful tendency to view the Jewish state, Britain’s democratic ally, as a colonialist aggressor and the Palestinians – even as they butcher children – as the “freedom fighters”. Regardless of the evidence, to many people this has become second nature.

It speaks of millennia of inherited anti-Semitism. A 2012 study by economists Nico Voigtländer and Hans-Joachim Voth found that Germans from towns where Jews were blamed for the Black Death and burnt alive in the 14th century were significantly more likely to vote for the Nazis 600 years later. In his 1945 essay, Orwell recalls a “young intellectual, communist or near-communist” remarking: “No, I do not like Jews. I’ve never made any secret of that. I can’t stick them. Mind you, I’m not anti-Semitic, of course.” Depressingly little has changed.

That is the advantage enjoyed by the jihadis of Gaza. They didn’t even need to keep their strategy a secret. Everyone knows they try to get civilians killed for propaganda gains, aiming to curtail Israeli operations with international outrage. Everyone knows that their censors keep dead terrorists away from the cameras, giving the world the impression that Israel is only attacking civilians (look up former AP reporter Matti Friedman’s seminal 2014 essay, “What the media gets wrong about Israel”, for a sense of how long such games have been played). A gang that murdered and mutilated babies may also, on occasion, be tempted to lie. So much should be obvious. But all this is smoothly eclipsed when a greater narrative is at work.

[okjuuzu]

@fromcydonia since you had a lot to say in my last post i will clarify the propaganda for you.

the initial report was retracted by the journalist who broke the news, she said she heard from one of the soldiers on scene but when pressed for evidence he back tracked and now on her twitter she is saying she never said anything. on top of that again, no primary source, the news sites and the white house also backtracked on the story because they were pressed for evidences and even israel denied the claim from the beginning yet they continue to run with the lie because it suits the narrative.

there is none, no reports of rape from israel what-so-ever. but they still ran with the narrative.

hamas carried guns and small grenade launchers as you could see from the videos the IDF released. these weapons are not enough to incinerate people. these injuries can be sustained by shelling, which what the IDF used. and you can also see hamas operative incinerated as well. 2 witnesses came out and said that the IDF was killing everyone hamas and civilians alike in desperation because hamas was kicking their asses. one of them said that hamas tied her and her partners hands but it was the IDF who killed her partner. also burning concreate structures does not collapse them which was the case in, tank shelling and air strikes do.

here's the tweet, also he backtracked and said he reported incorrectly because he the IDF doesn't strick hospitals which is a lie the IDF targeted like 10 hospitals in the past:

yes, israel and the us has an interest in weaking the region and helped isis, there was a story in which an major isis commander in libya was exposed to be an israeli agent and in another story isis apologized to israel for misfiring at them. state-sanctioned terrorism is a big rabbit hole people need to look into more.

for one albert einstien was a jew who called zionists "violent" and the american organization "jews for peace" protest for palestine and are antizionists so i am not speaking for jews and re-iterating what they say.

the USA government is trying to criminalize people protesting for palestine and a lot of right wing media is calling pro-palestine rallies pro hamas. just because you haven't heard it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

two main reasons they don't have shelters, first building a shelters for 2 million people in a small area is much much more. also, started building the tunnels in the 80s, before the blockade but now they could build shelters even with all the money in the world because they don't have enough concrete, and israel wont allow its passage. also the UN school are considered a safe bomb shelter protected by international law but israel still bombed them. i really wish there were shelters for people but they wouldn't need them if israel were not war criminals.

this is one of the fake rally picture

staged pictures with fake blood:

the israeli president was trying to push this narrative in and interveiw last week so again just because you haven't heard it doesn't mean it didn't happen

its my fault yeah they said its 1400 but in a haaretz article where they showed the age distribution of the victims they official count is around 600 and the majority is IDF casualties.

the point is not that its a bad graphics, the point is that that is not intelligence by definition. showing a 3D map isn't proof of anything.

its actually not stupid a lot of people have been pointing it out since day one and now the israeli officials and netanyahu are trying to pin it on each other.

[newsource21]

The number of civilian casualties in Gaza has been at the center of international attention since the start of the war. The main source for the data has been the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, which now claims more than 30,000 dead, the majority of which it says are children and women. Recently, the Biden administration lent legitimacy to Hamas’ figure. When asked at a House Armed Services Committee hearing last week how many Palestinian women and children have been killed since Oct. 7, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said the number was “over 25,000.” The Pentagon quickly clarified that the secretary “was citing an estimate from the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry.” President Biden himself had earlier cited this figure, asserting that “too many, too many of the over 27,000 Palestinians killed in this conflict have been innocent civilians and children, including thousands of children.” The White House also explained that the president “was referring to publicly available data about the total number of casualties.”

Here’s the problem with this data: The numbers are not real. That much is obvious to anyone who understands how naturally occurring numbers work. The casualties are not overwhelmingly women and children, and the majority may be Hamas fighters.

If Hamas’ numbers are faked or fraudulent in some way, there may be evidence in the numbers themselves that can demonstrate it. While there is not much data available, there is a little, and it is enough: From Oct. 26 until Nov. 10, 2023, the Gaza Health Ministry released daily casualty figures that include both a total number and a specific number of women and children.

The first place to look is the reported “total” number of deaths. The graph of total deaths by date is increasing with almost metronomical linearity, as the graph in Figure 1 reveals.

This regularity is almost surely not real. One would expect quite a bit of variation day to day. In fact, the daily reported casualty count over this period averages 270 plus or minus about 15%. This is strikingly little variation. There should be days with twice the average or more and others with half or less. Perhaps what is happening is the Gaza ministry is releasing fake daily numbers that vary too little because they do not have a clear understanding of the behavior of naturally occurring numbers. Unfortunately, verified control data is not available to formally test this conclusion, but the details of the daily counts render the numbers suspicious.

Similarly, we should see variation in the number of child casualties that tracks the variation in the number of women. This is because the daily variation in death counts is caused by the variation in the number of strikes on residential buildings and tunnels which should result in considerable variability in the totals but less variation in the percentage of deaths across groups. This is a basic statistical fact about chance variability. Consequently, on the days with many women casualties there should be large numbers of children casualties, and on the days when just a few women are reported to have been killed, just a few children should be reported. This relationship can be measured and quantified by the R-square (R2 ) statistic that measures how correlated the daily casualty count for women is with the daily casualty count for children. If the numbers were real, we would expect R2 to be substantively larger than 0, tending closer to 1.0. But R2 is .017 which is statistically and substantively not different from 0.

This lack of correlation is the second circumstantial piece of evidence suggesting the numbers are not real. But there is more. The daily number of women casualties should be highly correlated with the number of non-women and non-children (i.e., men) reported. Again, this is expected because of the nature of battle. The ebbs and flows of the bombings and attacks by Israel should cause the daily count to move together. But that is not what the data show. Not only is there not a positive correlation, there is a strong negative correlation, which makes no sense at all and establishes the third piece of evidence that the numbers are not real.

Consider some further anomalies in the data: First, the death count reported on Oct. 29 contradicts the numbers reported on the 28th, insofar as they imply that 26 men came back to life. This can happen because of misattribution or just reporting error. There are a few other days where the numbers of men are reported to be near 0. If these were just reporting errors, then on those days where the death count for men appears to be in error, the women’s count should be typical, at least on average. But it turns out that on the three days when the men’s count is near zero, suggesting an error, the women’s count is high. In fact, the three highest daily women casualty count occurs on those three days.

Taken together, what does this all imply? While the evidence is not dispositive, it is highly suggestive that a process unconnected or loosely connected to reality was used to report the numbers. Most likely, the Hamas ministry settled on a daily total arbitrarily. We know this because the daily totals increase too consistently to be real. Then they assigned about 70% of the total to be women and children, splitting that amount randomly from day to day. Then they in-filled the number of men as set by the predetermined total. This explains all the data observed.

There are other obvious red flags. The Gaza Health Ministry has consistently claimed that about 70% of the casualties are women or children. This total is far higher than the numbers reported in earlier conflicts with Israel. Another red flag, raised by Salo Aizenberg and written about extensively, is that if 70% of the casualties are women and children and 25% of the population is adult male, then either Israel is not successfully eliminating Hamas fighters or adult male casualty counts are extremely low. This by itself strongly suggests that the numbers are at a minimum grossly inaccurate and quite probably outright faked. Finally, on Feb. 15, Hamas admitted to losing 6,000 of its fighters, which represents more than 20% of the total number of casualties reported.

Taken together, Hamas is reporting not only that 70% of casualties are women and children but also that 20% are fighters. This is not possible unless Israel is somehow not killing noncombatant men, or else Hamas is claiming that almost all the men in Gaza are Hamas fighters.

Are there better numbers? Some objective commentators have acknowledged Hamas’ numbers in previous battles with Israel to be roughly accurate. Nevertheless, this war is wholly unlike its predecessors in scale or scope; international observers who were able to monitor previous wars are now completely absent, so the past can’t be assumed to be a reliable guide. The fog of war is especially thick in Gaza, making it impossible to quickly determine civilian death totals with any accuracy. Not only do official Palestinian death counts fail to differentiate soldiers from children, but Hamas also blames all deaths on Israel even if caused by Hamas’ own misfired rockets, accidental explosions, deliberate killings, or internal battles. One group of researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health compared Hamas reports to data on UNRWA workers. They argued that because the death rates were approximately similar, Hamas’ numbers must not be inflated. But their argument relied on a crucial and unverified assumption: that UNRWA workers are not disproportionately more likely to be killed than the general population. That premise exploded when it was uncovered that a sizable fraction of UNRWA workers are affiliated with Hamas. Some were even exposed as having participated in the Oct. 7 massacre itself.

The truth can’t yet be known and probably never will be. The total civilian casualty count is likely to be extremely overstated. Israel estimates that at least 12,000 fighters have been killed. If that number proves to be even reasonably accurate, then the ratio of noncombatant casualties to combatants is remarkably low: at most 1.4 to 1 and perhaps as low as 1 to 1. By historical standards of urban warfare, where combatants are embedded above and below into civilian population centers, this is a remarkable and successful effort to prevent unnecessary loss of life while fighting an implacable enemy that protects itself with civilians.

[naturalrights-retard]

International Man: Throughout history, governments have always used propaganda to drum up support for war. Often, their atrocity propaganda features children to get the maximum emotional response.

For example, during World War 1, the US media whipped up a frenzy by claiming that the Germans were bayoneting Belgian babies. The atrocities never happened.

In the run-up to the Gulf War in 1991, Americans were told that Iraqi soldiers were ripping babies from incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals. President George H.W. Bush later repeated the story. It was a pivotal event that increased support for the war. Later, the incident was revealed to be fake, and the woman making the claims was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington, someone who had a motive to get the US involved in the war.

More recently, the media told us about the Palestinian Hamas beheading 40 Israeli babies. President Joe Biden repeated the incident. It was later revealed not to have occurred.

These are just a few examples of this propaganda tactic.

What is your take on all of this?

Doug Casey: It’s long been said, quite correctly, that “The first casualty in war is truth.” Especially when it comes to war reporting, you never know what to believe. It’s impossible to separate truth from propaganda most of the time. Emotion almost always triumphs over reason.

Americans are particularly vulnerable to emotional arguments because they always see themselves as the “good guys.” Although their interventions almost always made things worse—starting with the US fomenting the Spanish-American War, then prolonging World War I and setting up the conditions for World War II. Foreign disasters have gotten worse since—in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Now, in the Ukraine and Gaza. And lots of others on the runway. Americans are particularly vulnerable to seeing themselves as saviors when they should just mind their own business.

[jhavelikes]

Pippa Allen-Kinross, the news editor with the factchecking website Full Fact, said that after more than a month of continuous conflict in Israel and Gaza, disinformation narratives were evolving and highlighted the growing visibility of “Pallywood” postings, claims that Palestinians were faking videos of suffering and distress. Early in the conflict, on 13 October, the Israeli state’s official account on X tweeted a video of a child being taken to hospital alongside another image of the lifeless infant wrapped in a cloth. “Hamas accidentally posted a video of a doll (yes a doll) suggesting that it was a part of casualties caused by an IDF attack,” the now-deleted post, which was viewed at least 1.2m times, said. The post was prompted by similar claims made by Israeli activists online, and other official accounts. Israeli embassies in France and Austria quickly followed suit, with the latter describing it as “Pallywood fake news” and the posting was widely shared. But the story, when checked, turned out to be untrue: the original film and the still image were of a four-year-old boy, Omar Bilal al-Banna, killed in Gaza City. Journalists contacted the photographer and film-maker Momen El Halabi, who reported that a child had been killed – and that the body was not a doll – a story also confirmed by family members.

Israel-Hamas fake news thrives on poorly regulated online platforms | Israel-Hamas war | The Guardian

[honesty-my-policy]

your post about the comparison on Muslim and jews makes no sense, Israel didn't even exist until 1948 but the Palestine coin is older than Israel n that clearly states that Palestine have the right to the land. it was Palestine who took in Jewish REFUGEES, go fact check yourself.

actually. go fact check yourself. the Quran itself mentions Israel. not to mention on the actual wikipedia page it states “The first record of the name Israel (as ysrỉꜣr) occurs in the Merneptah stele, erected for Egyptian Pharaoh Merneptah (son of Ramses II) c. 1209 BCE” - so. uh. wrong-o there.

not to mention the Quran states that Allah gave Isiah the land of Israel - source 1, 2,

even if Muslims do own more countries than Israel why does that matter? does that make it acceptable for Israel to commit war crimes and kill innocent people and CHILDREN all for land ownership.

because the people at fault are people using the civilians as humans shields. why is the HAMAS command base under a hospital? Why do they store weapons in crowded civilian areas?

people in Israel have warning systems beforehand what do the Palestinians even have?

they have the Israel people sending leaflets telling them when they are going to strike because they aren’t trying to kill civilians but their government tells them “nooo, don’t flee the area, it’s all just psychological warfare - y’know all those weapons we stored in your area??? forget about them. we don’t need you as a human shield at all!!!” - they also send empty shells to warn civilians that bombings are about to start. the real enemy here is HAMAS. - source 1, 2, 3,

blaming Hamas n calling them a terrorist organization is like blaming a woman for punching her rapist

except they are actually classified as a terrorist organization by 8 countries. so, i’m not just “calling them” anything.

can you even tell me the uniform of the Palestinian army? I bet you can't, it's bec they don't even exist.

That’s because the entire country of Palestine used to be Israel, so technically Palestine is just Israel. but anyway - the Geneva Convention lay out the definitions between a combatant and a non-combatant along with different types of protected statuses. It is against the laws of war for one to enter into a conflict as a combatant without meeting certain requirements, such as wearing a uniform. A uniform is simply a distinctive outfit that can be recognized or differentiated at a distance; also, carrying weapons openly or conducting military operations in the open classifies one as a combatant in the laws of war. There is no way to differentiate between soldiers and civilians as there is no uniform, no dog tags, and just in general they wouldn’t report it if there were.  This allows them to report large numbers of civilian casualties in the place of their fighters.  No authority checking into the matter can say otherwise.

if you are reading what i’ve wrote and think “hmm, sounds fake” - do your own research. just as you recommended i do. get out of your information bubble. i checked things out from both sides. and i do empathize with the Palestine civilians but they are being taken advantage of by the HAMAS. what they need to do is welcome the Israel army in to expunge HAMAS from their home. then once the Terrorists are gone, if there are still issues, be loud about it - show the world what Israel is doing.