The Ben Mulroney Show - Number of civilians killed in Gaza inflated to vilify Israel

Episode Date: December 18, 2024

Number of civilians killed in Gaza inflated to vilify Israel Guest: Andrew Fox, a disinformation researcher and former British army officer, research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society  If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! https://globalnews.ca/national/program/the-ben-mulroney-show Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Enjoy

On January 15th of this year, I posted on X Twitter, I said, it strikes me as odd that the casualty toll numbers provided by Hamas are accepted without question by so many. Call me crazy, but a group that rapes, beheads, murders and takes innocent hostages probably doesn't have an ethical problem with fudging the numbers. Now, that was a, that was a, it is what it is. I didn't back it up with any sort of data and so i took my lumps by certain people who took issue with me and who just don't like don't like israel and don't like jews so it was very nice and very emboldening to read across the internet

that the organization the henry jackson, did a deep dive into those very numbers and concluded that the number of civilians killed in Gaza is inflated to vilify Israel. We're joined now by Andrew Fox, a research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society. He also served 16 years in the British Army, completed three tours in Afghanistan, and he participated in this study.

Andrew, thank you for joining us on the show and thank you for your service. Yeah, they've certainly had a superb 14 months when it comes to what we call information warfare. Yeah. And they've been deliberately trying to leverage the deaths of women and children and maximize them as much as possible, not only on the ground, but in their reporting to try and essentially get the international community to force Israel to stop fighting.

Because if Hamas survived, then they've won as far as they're concerned. So what's the current casualty toll that the Gaza health ministry would want us to believe today? So they were stating 45,000 people murdered by IDF action is the headline from yesterday. It was making news all over the world as the 45,000 number was passed. But what of course Hamas are critically omitting is that up to half of those are combatants. And that's really important because there's a very, very big difference

between 45,000 dead civilians and half-half fighters versus civilians. Now, I think it's also really important to say that's still a huge number of people, and every single one of those is a tragedy, and nobody would want to take away from that. But we have to try and find a way to frame this war and try and work out what's going on. And what 50-50 shows us is that Israel is taking huge care with civilians to the extent that they can. And Andrew, well,

exactly. I think, I think that nuance has to be highlighted as well, that this is not a regular warfare. They're not fighting an ethical enemy. They're fighting an enemy that relies on the death of innocence and, and we'll, we'll, and will do what they can. If it serves their ends, they'll make sure that those innocents are in the path of destruction.

Exactly that. And we saw back in October, 2023, when the Israelis announced the humanitarian corridor going south, we've seen the videos of Hamas planting IEDs on the road, of forcing people back into Gaza City at gunpoint. You don't build your entire defensive infrastructure based around civilian buildings, homes and mosques and hospitals, if you're not deliberately trying to put civilians in harm's way. And I think it's underreported, of course, that that is entirely a war crime on the part of Hamas. So let's talk about what some of your findings are. So the number report is 45,000. You say it's significantly lower. What makes it lower?

Cause I know, I know for example, that 5,000 are of those deaths are natural deaths and there's sort of cancer patients that have been listed. So walk me through how we pare back the, the, the numbers, the number of total deaths and arrive

at a more accurate number. I mean, we're actually not trying to dispute the 45,000 total. I think there's a bit of misreporting on that. And actually in previous conflicts, Israel and Hamas have had roughly the same numbers of total dead. What we've seen consistently is an obscuration of fighter deaths in those total. So we're seeing a pattern that we saw in 2008, 9, that we saw in 2014, saw in 2018. So we know Hamas do this. But what are some of their number tricks that they pull? So we've seen huge numbers of women listed where we know that they're actually men. We've seen cancer patients. We've seen adults listed as children.

And, you know, we can say this deliberate. We can say it's accidental. It might just be that it's very, very difficult to collate the lists of the dead in a war zone. But either way, it makes these numbers unreliable. So when you're getting the number of 70% women and children thrown around, we can safely say that's not true. And even the UN have taken that number down when the errors in Hamas' system were reported to them.

And on top of that, even before the computer system that recorded all this stuff went down in November 2023, there were days when Hamas reported more women and children had died than the total number of deaths they were reporting. So there's no excuse for that. I mean, the system that is apparently so reliable was up and running. There's no excuse for it.

There's no excuse for listing a 31-year-old man as a one-year-old child, as we found. You know, this was from the hospital report, so they would have had a dead body in front of them. There's no way you can mistake a 31-year-old man for a baby. There's stuff in here that we can say for an absolutely solid fact is a result of really poor methodology

or deliberate attempts to try and manipulate the data. Now, Andrew, you have an honorable personal history in the military. And I don't know if you heard me before, but I want to thank you for your service. But given that time in the military, did you happen to spend time at any point in your career with members of the IDF?

No, I didn't. But I have been into Gaza twice with them this year. I've been into Lebanon, into a Hezbollah tunnel with them. I've been at every level of the IDF from the defense downwards. I've had a really good look at their procedures. And tell our listeners about their procedures because not a day goes by that I don't,

if I ever address the war on my social media, that people will come back and refer to the genocidal IDF, the colonialist powers of Israel. What has been your experience with the soldiers on the ground? I mean, they're very similar to ours in many ways, and particularly their targeting processes. And I think that was something I was really interested in because we know how many people have been killed by airstrikes. It's a huge number. And I want to make sure that if I'm trying to analyze this war, I need to know that a proper process has been followed before someone's pulled the trigger on that missile.

And they do a process and a targeting procedure where they consult lawyers and they look at collateral damage. And they brief me that one in every two airstrikes, this war has been canceled because the collateral damage was too high. So as far as I'm concerned, they do things no differently to how the US or the British army or the Canadian army would do. And you know, I served alongside the Vandu's the 22nd in Kandahar. So I've seen the Canadians working as well. So I know how we do this stuff and the IDF are no different. And Andrew, they are human beings, which means they will make mistakes. What happens when a strike goes wrong and there are casualties that they

didn't expect? What process do they have? They've got a couple of processes actually. So if there's a suggestion that a war crime has been committed, they have the military advocate general's department. They've got over a hundred soldiers of the 300 000 they've put through gaza currently being investigated for war crimes um they have the fact finding and assessment mechanism which works to the chief of the general staff um it's his way of getting to the bottom of stuff fast so they've got a thousand soldiers they're looking at there so they have very good mechanisms for for holding their troops accountable but as you say you know war zones are very complex beasts. Mistakes, of course, will happen. Have innocent civilians died in an airstrike where

there was no militants? I would guarantee it. Andrew, Andrew, we're going to leave it there. I got to leave it there, but I want to thank you for this, this work. The data bears out what I've believed for a long time, and I appreciate your hard work on this. And again, thank you for your service. Thank you so much.