As Israel defends itself against an existential threat, U.N. entities have focused only on civilian casualties in Gaza, Gilad Erdan, the Israeli ambassador to the global body, said last Friday shortly after Russia and China vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution that Washington drafted.

“Numbers supplied by the terrorists are thrown around and quoted as if they are the word of God,” Erdan said. “Yet in essence, these numbers are merely the lies of Hamas that the U.N. is so quick to parrot. The time has come to put an end to this myth.”

Hamas’s “false statistics” come from “the Gaza Ministry of Health that it controls,” and those numbers “are then parroted around the globe, promoting the lies of terrorists,” he said.

“By merely looking, only looking, at the Hamas numbers, it is crystal clear that they cannot represent reality,” he added. “A statistics professor from Wharton Business School recently released an analysis of the Hamas—sorry, ‘Gaza Ministry of Health’—numbers proving that not only are they distorted, but they are also inflated. They have no possible basis in reality.”

The Israeli envoy noted that what he called mythic numbers spread across the globe. He did not mention that senior U.S. officials, including U.S. President Joe Biden, have used the same numbers as Hamas for weeks.

“This war has taken a greater toll on innocent civilians than all previous wars in Gaza combined. More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed,” Biden said on March 7 during his State of the Union address, which 32.2 million people reportedly watched.

As Biden said “have been killed,” New York City radio host Sid Rosenberg called out “Says who?” He was escorted out of the event, but not arrested. Biden continued, “most of whom are not Hamas. Thousands and thousands of innocents—women and children. Girls and boys also orphaned.”

“And according to the Palestinian health ministry and the Gaza health ministry, which are not credible news sources, 30,000 people are dead,” Rosenberg later told JNS. “Once he went there and actually quoted the Palestinian Ministry of Health, as if that’s a credible news source, that’s when I got furious.”

JNS asked a spokesman for Erdan whether the Israeli envoy meant to direct his critique of the United Nations and its Security Council to extend also to Washington. The spokesman declined to comment.

“It is absurd for anyone, let alone Israel’s allies, to blindly rely on casualty numbers provided by Hamas, a group that committed the most heinous crimes on Oct. 7,” Arsen Ostrovsky, CEO of the International Legal Forum and a human rights attorney, told JNS.

“Hamas can scream these numbers all they want, but it makes them no truer than if they were to repeatedly scream the earth was flat,” he added.

Significant impact

The International Court of Justice, the main judicial arm of the United Nations in The Hague, ordered Israel on Thursday to report, within 30 days, on allegations that it is causing a famine in Gaza, based largely on figures produced by the United Nations through Hamas’s health ministry.

Even if Hamas’s casualties are accepted broadly, “they bear no legal weight and would still need to be proved in a court of law, including that Israel failed to abide by the principles of distinction and proportionality, which there is no indication it has failed to do so,” Ostrovsky, the human rights lawyer, told JNS.

The court of international opinion operates differently than a court of law though.

“The bigger issue is how this is perceived in the public arena,” Ostrovsky said. “Unquestionably and blindly relying on purported casualty numbers by Hamas, when they have shown to be completely fabricated or inflated and failing to distinguish between terrorists and potential civilians, is not only reckless and irresponsible, but fans the flame of antisemitism and the pervasive discourse against Israel.”

That Jew-hatred flame “has already directly led to violence against Jewish communities in the United States and around the world,” according to Ostrovsky.

Image - Flash90