A reporter asked President Joe Biden on Wednesday if reports from the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry that over 6,000 Palestinians — including 2,700 children — had been killed since Oct. 7 indicated that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was ignoring his advice to minimize civilian casualties.
“I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed,” Biden replied. “I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war.”
After adding that Israel should be “careful” about “going after the folks that are propagating this war,” he reiterated skepticism of the casualty number: “I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.”
It was an astonishing comment, questioning the very premise of the query and claiming that the Palestinian people — not just Hamas — can’t be trusted to count their dead. Biden’s words weren’t just ill-founded and insensitive, they were reckless.
Biden is opening the door to conspiracy theories about whether Palestinians are lying or exaggerating about mass casualties.
Israel is conducting one of the most intense bombing campaigns of the 21st century in one of the most densely populated areas in the world. It is openly pursuing collective punishment in the Gaza Strip, justifying cutting off food, water, electricity and fuel to the territory by calling Gazans "human animals," and striking loads of civilian infrastructure. If the president was true to his warning to Israel “not to be blinded by rage,” he would be sounding the alarms about war crimes. Instead Biden is opening the door to conspiracy theories about whether Palestinians are lying or exaggerating about mass casualties.
Are there reasonable questions about whether Gaza’s Ministry of Health, which is an agency in the Hamas-controlled government of the Gaza Strip, is releasing accurate numbers? Certainly. On a logistical level alone, the Ministry of Health is counting bodies during a time when keeping tallies must be exceedingly difficult. Morgues are overflowing, hospitals are running out of body bags, aid workers are being killed, many bodies are trapped under rubble, and people are hurriedly digging mass graves to deal with the problem of so many dead in an area with such little space. Record-keeping during a “complete siege” from Israel, with electricity and fuel scarce, is chaotic and likely to result in an imperfect count. And the physical inaccessibility of many of the dead makes it plausible that deaths could be undercounted.
There are also questions of whether Hamas’ control of the government means that the numbers could be exaggerated as part of a propaganda effort. In particular, the Gaza Health Ministry’s initial report of 500 deaths after an explosion at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital has been widely contested. Palestinian officials reduced the number of deaths slightly after additional scrutiny, while U.S. intelligence agencies have estimated that 100 to 300 people were killed, although they haven’t explained how they’ve arrived at their conclusions. Given the shroud of mystery surrounding even who is responsible for the explosion, it is not entirely surprising that the casualty rates have been difficult to pin down.
But even if one grants that this particular tally was incorrect, there is still good reason to think of the Ministry of Health’s numbers as generally credible. Indeed, the ministry has a respectable track record according to human rights watchdogs, the United Nations, and even the U.S. government itself.
While many Westerners perceive Hamas solely as a militant or terrorist network, it is also a governing authority in Gaza, and controls a bureaucracy that predates its rule, with civil servants who don’t necessarily streamline into a unified political operation. Hospital workers across the Gaza Strip track Palestinian casualties through a computer network, which tracks people’s names and ID numbers. They are also sourced through Palestinian humanitarian organizations. As The Associated Press reports, the Ministry of Health “is a mix of recent Hamas hires and older civil servants affiliated with the secular nationalist Fatah party.” Ahmed al-Kahlot, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, told the AP that at the ministry, “Hamas is one of the factions. Some of us are aligned with Fatah, some are independent.” He added, “More than anything, we are medical professionals.”
Outside observers have generally found that the Ministry of Health’s figures are professional, not propaganda. “We have been monitoring human rights abuses in the Gaza Strip for three decades, including several rounds of hostilities. We’ve generally found the data that comes out of the ministry of health to be reliable,” Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch, told The Guardian. “When we have done our own independent investigations around particular strikes, and we’ve compared those figures against those from the health ministry, there haven’t been major deviations.” Shakir also said he was “quite confident in the overall casualty numbers” coming out based on satellite imagery, what his organization is seeing on the ground, and the number of airstrikes in the area.
He counseled skepticism of Palestinian claims about deaths at a time when there is a superabundance of evidence that Gazans are dying en masse.
The AP notes that in the past several rounds of hostility between Hamas and Israel in the Gaza Strip, the U.N.’s tallies of Palestinian deaths based on its own research have “largely been consistent” with the Gaza Health Ministry’s counts. The chief of the U.N. agency for Palestine refugees, Philippe Lazzarini, told reporters on Friday that “in the past, the five, six cycles of conflict in the Gaza Strip, these figures were considered as credible and no one ever really challenged these figures.” Michael Ryan, executive director of the World Health Organization’s Health Emergencies Program said recently that “the numbers may not be perfectly accurate on a minute-to-minute basis” but they “largely reflect the level of death and injury.”
This reputation of credibility is why groups like the U.N. and Biden’s own internal State Department reports will cite the Ministry of Health when assessing the toll of the war. And one must not delude oneself into thinking that Israel’s government — or any government — has its hands clean when it comes to issuing misleading information during conflict.
Even if after taking all of this into account, we were to grant that, in this particular round of hostilities, the Ministry of Health’s estimates could be less accurate than usual, Biden’s language was still inappropriate. He encouraged sweeping suspicion of Palestinian claims about deaths at a time when there is a superabundance of evidence and documentation indicating that Gazans are dying en masse due to an indiscriminate bombardment campaign, and when human rights observers, the United Nations, and scholars of genocide are all warning that Israel may be committing war crimes. Biden might’ve thought he was protecting Israel — and the U.S.’s complicity in its assault on innocent life — by trying to take a jab at Hamas. But it was a crude denial of catastrophe that history will not look upon fondly.