September 2, 2025

So Hamas does lie, after all.

Reporting on Israel’s elimination of another senior Hamas terrorist in Gaza on September 1, the Times noted, in the article’s second paragraph: “Hamas has rarely acknowledged the deaths of its leaders in real time, often taking weeks or months to concede their demise.”

Weeks or months! The Times is, in effect, admitting that for weeks or months at a time, Hamas spokesmen lie—claiming that one or another of its leaders is alive, when in fact they’re dead.

But how, then, does one explain this sentence in the thirteenth paragraph of the very same news article: “More than 60,000 people, including thousands of children, have been killed by the Israeli campaign in Gaza, according to local health officials…”

The so-called “local health officials” are, in fact, officials of Hamas’s own Health Ministry. They serve an international terrorist organization, which is a crucially important fact because it goes to the question of their credibility as sources of information.

Terrorist organizations routinely lie to the news media. They believe that telling lies is justified in order to advance their cause. A terrorist group that is in the midst of active warfare has even more incentive to lie, because its lies help stoke international pressure on the enemy.

In the case of Gaza, the terrorist spokesmen have even less credibility (if that’s possible), because their lies already have been exposed, repeatedly, in this war. To cite just one example, Hamas told the international news media on October 17, 2023, that Israel bombed the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City, killing 471 people and wounding 342. Major media outlets dutifully reported that claim.

A few days later, however, the truth came out, and even the New York Times admitted it: The explosion was caused by a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket, not an Israeli air strike. The area that was struck was not the hospital, but an adjacent parking lot. And the actual number of dead at Al-Ahli was in the dozens, not the hundreds.

If that episode was not enough to make one doubt the reliability of Hamas’s numbers, one should consider the fact that Hamas spokesmen routinely describe the Holocaust as a hoax. How can anything that comes from the mouth of a Holocaust denier be considered reliable?

Moreover, Article 32 of the official Hamas Charter cites The Protocols of the Elders of Zionas proof that there is a global Jewish conspiracy. How can any claim made by antisemitic conspiracy lunatics be considered truthful?

Yet the New York Times still parrots Hamas’s casualty figures in Gaza—even in an article which elsewhere acknowledges that Hamas lies about the deaths of its leaders. What explains the decision by the Times and other media outlets to believe Hamas?

One reason is that the Hamas casualty numbers reinforce the dominant narrative in much of the media’s reporting about the Gaza war, namely, that the cruel Israels are killing lots of people. But there’s an additional reason: Hamas offers the media a daily death toll, while Israel doesn’t.

Israeli officials have said that the Hamas casualty figures are extreme exaggerations. But Israel doesn’t offer specific counter-estimates, precisely because chaotic battlefield conditions make it impossible to be certain about the numbers. The Israelis don’t want to offer an estimate, and then find themselves ridiculed by media outlets if it turns out, after the smoke clears, that their number was slightly off. They know they can’t count on the international news media to give Israel the benefit of the doubt—ever.

Perhaps Israeli officials have learned from Vietnam.

During the Vietnam War, American military officials often judged the success or failure of a particular mission according to the number of Vietcong fighters who were killed. That put pressure on field commanders to exaggerate the number of enemy fatalities.

Reports that the casualty numbers were unreliable soon began appearing in the US press, especially with the release of the Pentagon Papers, the internal Defense Department documents that were stolen by critics of US policy and published in the New York Times in the summer of 1971.

In January 1972, a Doonesbury cartoon mocking the body count exaggerations depicted a field commander making up the casualty numbers based on that day’s date.

Many years later, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, recalling his experiences in Vietnam in 1969-1970, admitted that “[The] body count was a big lie.” When his superiors asked for a number, “I’d say, ‘I don’t know what the body count was.’ They’d say, ‘Well, make one up. We have to report a body count.’ So, eventually, just to get them off your back, you’d say, ‘O.K., the body count was 250’.” As a result, Schwarzkopf refused to announce enemy casualty estimates when he led American forces in the first Gulf War, in 1991.

Israel’s reluctance to issue body count estimates is understandable. But one consequence is that it has left the field open for Hamas to provide false numbers to journalists who, because of convenience or because of bias, are all too ready to parrot them, evidence or no evidence.

Dr. Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author of more than 20 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust. His book The Road to October 7: Hamas, the Holocaust, and the Eternal War Against the Jews will be published on October 1, 2025, by The Jewish Publication Society / University of Nebraska Press.