Time to wake up, @Lapdog, and accept facts…no genocide, no...

Time to wake up, @Lapdog, and accept facts…no genocide, no “relentless slaughtering” or anything remotely like it.

Gazan authorities’ repeated claims that women and children make up 70 per cent of the more than 30,000 Gazan casualties since the war started is “statistically impossible”, according to an analysis undertaken by three Australian academics.

Their article, published in the Britain-based Fathom journal, also says there is “serious doubt” about other aspects of the Gazan death count.

While the authors stress that every death is a human tragedy, they forensically examined the 70 per cent figure, which they say has gone unchallenged in most media coverage of the war.

They note that in late February, the Gazan Ministry of Health announced casualties had topped the 30,000 mark and that 70 per cent of them were women and children.

That figure has been repeatedly cited by Gazan authorities during the course of the war, their paper says.

Yet 43 per cent of those 30,000 were not hospital-registered deaths and were included as coming from “reliable media sources”.

Those unregistered deaths have been manipulated to dramatically overstate female and child casualties, the paper says.

Of the some 7000 unregistered deaths reported by both the MoH and the Hamas Government Media Office as at the end of 2023, the paper concludes just 10 were purported to be male. “This is obviously absurd,” report co-author, lawyer and University of Wollongong academic Greg Rose said.

“It’s clear the data, particularly the unregistered ‘media sources’ deaths, are being manipulated to contain almost no males.”

Professor Rose, along with Adelaide-based population economist Tom Simpson and RMIT biomathematician Lewi Stone, used publicly available data sources to adduce their findings through a statistical analysis.

“This paper demonstrates that the casualty figures concerning women and children are statistically impossible,” the study concludes. “Our results cast serious doubt on all other aspects of the Gazan death counts.”

		THEAUSTRALIAN.COM.AU03:28 ‘Only way’ Hamas has no future in Gaza is if Israel ‘defeats them in battle’

Strategic Analysis Australia Director Peter Jennings says the “only way” Hamas won’t have a future in Gaza is if… Israel “defeats them in battle”. There are growing calls for restraint as the world reacts to Iran’s aerial bombardment of Israel. It is Tehran’s first-ever direct attack on its neighbour. Israel says More

Their report in Fathom, published by the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre, notes that even among the verifiable hospital data, 58 per cent of registered deaths were women and children, not 70 per cent. In 2024, that proportion fell to 42 per cent.

“This is still a large proportion, but it should be remembered that women and children make up 75 per cent of Gaza’s population,” the report says.

It finds that both the Ministry of Health and Hamas’ Government Media Office published the same total deaths as a result of the conflict through to the end of 2023 – 21,978, with the MoH reporting 15,349 were hospital-registered.

It says while the GMO reported 6098 male deaths, with the other 72 per cent being women and children, the MOH reported 6088 registered male deaths.

“We reverse-engineered those 2023 unregistered death claims and found that according to Hamas, just 10 men had been killed and their deaths not been registered, while almost 5000 children and 2000 women had been killed and their deaths not registered,” Professor Rose said.

Greg Rose, Professor of Law, University of Wollongong

He said the analysis had also uncovered a period in December when the statistics coming from the GMO saw the cumulative number of males killed in the war decline by more than 1000.

“There is no doubt many women and children have tragically been killed in Gaza – something to be expected given Hamas’ unfortunate use of human shields and given that most Gazans are women and children – but the precise proportion cannot be known,” he said. “The number of deaths of women and children, who are largely civilians, is demonstrated by the study to be a far smaller proportion of casualties than being reported.

“Our paper confirms the old saying that the first casualty of war is truth.”

STEPHEN LUNN

It’s way past time that you stopped your ridiculous claims of genocide”, “relentlessly slaughtering” and the like, and accepted some facts.