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For perhaps the first time in history, Hamas have dropped a press release that the legacy media aren’t immediately parroting like a flock of demented budgies. That’s because it blows out of the water all their lies about ‘genocide’ in Gaza.
This week, the Hamas “Ministry of Social Development” dropped an announcement: they would be paying stipends to war widows of its fighters killed in the “Al-Aqsa Flood War”, Hamas’ name for the Gaza war they started on October 7, 2023.
So what? You may respond. We know that Hamas has been paying the families of suicide bombers for years. This is true, but there is a telling detail in the announcement.
Number of beneficiaries: 50,000 families.
How’s your maths skills? Hamas regularly claims that 70,000 ‘Palestinians’ have been killed in the war they started. But they conspicuously never say how many were their fighters – terrorists, in a word. The legacy media and the Pallywankers, in their usual stupid game of Chinese Whispers, then screech and gibber that ‘70,000 innocent civilians have been murdered by Israel! Genocide!’
Leaving aside that even 70,000 civilian deaths in a war still does not amount to a ‘genocide’ (especially not when the ‘Palestinian’ population has actually increased over the past two years), there is the obvious problem of (deliberately) equating combatant casualties with civilian deaths.
Well, thanks to Hamas’ little slip, we now have a good idea of just how many Hamas fighters have been dispatched to Jehannum in the past two years.
Hamas plans to disburse 500 shekels – some US $160 – to every widow of those killed in the “Al-Aqsa Flood War,” the group announced Wednesday. Payment would be made to as many as 50,000 widowed families, it said, amounting to total disbursements of some 25 million shekels (US $8 million).
Though not stated explicitly in the statement, it was widely understood in Gaza that the reference to “Al-Aqsa Flood” – Hamas’s term for its October 7, 2023 onslaught – meant the lion’s share of aid would go to the widows of Hamas members, who have been provided their own designated tent camps.
So, at least 50,000 combatant deaths. If we accept the Hamas claims of less than 70,000 total deaths, that means that at most around 18,000 have been non-combatants. At most.
Given Hamas’ well-known proclivity for exaggeration, the real figure is likely much less.
In the context of an urban guerilla war fought in one of the most densely populated areas on earth, against an enemy notorious for using civilians as human shields and a fanatical population obsessed with ‘martyrdom’, it all adds up to a remarkably low civilian casualty rate.
After all, estimates of civilian casualties in urban warfare range from 66 per cent to 90 per cent. In Gaza, using Hamas’ figures, it’s at most 23 per cent.
Israel ought to be congratulated for its incredible humanitarian effort while trying to eradicate the modern enemies of humanity.
