Anti-Israel propaganda disguised as medical research
The following commentary was written as an open statement, composed by me and six of my physician colleagues from Canada, the USA, Australia, and South Africa.
The war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, thankfully now on pause but probably not definitively over, has regrettably caused a terrible toll of death and destruction in that small region. Unsurprisingly, this war has had a polarizing effect on many people around the world. As physicians and scientists we are dismayed that some of our colleagues have abused the medical literature by using it as a podium to express political views thinly disguised as medical-scientific research.
This was exemplified by a recent article entitled Traumatic injury mortality in the Gaza Strip from Oct 7, 2023, to June 30, 2024: a capture–recapture analysis, published in the prestigious medical journal Lancet. The article engages in the unethical practice of data torturing – the manipulation of data to support a desired outcome – to spuriously reveal an “exceptionally high” rate of traumatic mortality caused by the Israeli military in pursuing its defensive war against Hamas in Gaza. In the paper, Dr. Jamaluddine and co-authors analyze inaccurate data to justify their spurious accusation that Israel deliberately falsifies its claim that it aims to minimize civilian casualties. The arguments in this paper are based on data from official sources that are faulty and from social media that are problematic. They rely further on conjecture and on projected mortality figures.
The editor and reviewers who accepted this paper are potentially complicit in this manipulation of data for political reasons. They failed to analyze the validity of the input data used by the authors, an oversight that we can only hope reflects their naiveté and not bias, conscious or unconscious. Statistical analysis of raw data that are primarily unreliable cannot be accepted at face value. As the saying goes, ‘if you torture your data long enough, they will tell you whatever you want to hear.’
The authors and editors mislead readers in publishing this paper as an ostensibly scientific, objective, and unprejudiced analysis. They do not provide any thoughtful consideration of the political, social, and military context of the deaths they report. Using sophisticated biostatistical methodology to analyze unreliable data is a classic example of the maxim garbage in garbage out. They invite readers to conclude that Israel’s military actions in Gaza have been indiscriminate or even deliberately designed to maximize civilian deaths, rather than an effort to root out the militant jihadist terrorist group Hamas. Deliberate exaggerations of the toll of Israeli military actions are not new, a cautionary example being the infamous “Jenin massacre” of 2002, in which the Palestinian allegation of 500 civilian deaths was disproven by a UN investigation, which revised the death toll to 52, of whom up to half may have been combatants. The libelous accusations made by the authors of this Lancet paper are another contribution to the discredited effort to delegitimize Israel.
In presenting a political polemic disguised as objective science, the authors of this paper and of other similar contributions choose to ignore the following facts:
- Israel employs precision munitions, issues evacuation alerts, and establishes humanitarian corridors to minimize harm to non-combatants.
- Hamas has acknowledged that maximizing its own citizens’ death rates serves its interest and is part of its war strategy. To this end, Hamas deliberately puts its civilians in harm’s way, denying them access to underground shelter, and using homes, schools, hospitals, and mosques as weapons storage and launching sites.
- Hamas’ rocket attacks are designed to deliberately and indiscriminately kill Israeli civilians. The fact that Israel’s defensive actions render these attempts relatively ineffective does not absolve Hamas of blame.
- The major source of data for this paper, the Gaza Ministry of Health (MOH), is an organ of Hamas. Evidence has shown that as such, it deliberately inflates mortality figures. As the MOH was the major source of input data for death estimates reported in the Jamaluddine paper, the analysis is therefore tainted and invalid.
- Israel is fighting a defensive war to deter an aggressor, Hamas, which initiated the conflict by invading Israel with avowedly genocidal intent, brutalizing, massacring, abusing, and kidnapping civilians. Far from disavowing this invidious goal, Hamas repeated the threats after the massacre.
- It was entirely within Hamas’ power to immediately end the killing of Gazans at any time during the war, by freeing the kidnapped civilians.
- The authors did not attempt to distinguish combatant from non-combatant deaths, the proportion of which has been more favorable in this war than in other modern urban armed conflicts.
- The deaths are implicitly all attributed to Israeli military action, ignoring deaths caused by misfired Hamas rockets that land in Gaza and by Hamas ordinance exploding as a result of Israeli attacks, as well as by mis-attribution of deaths from illness and natural causes.
- Traumatic death rates are described as “exceptionally high” (terminology used to vilify Israel’s military conduct) by spuriously comparing them to previous limited conflicts in Gaza, which were provoked by Hamas rocket attacks on civilian targets. Israel’s actions in the current conflict are a response to the incomparably greater provocation of October 7, 2023.
Non-combatant deaths in warfare are tragic. Each lost life brings untold grief to the survivors left behind. We mourn with Gazans and Israelis who have lost loved ones in this conflict. As in all wars, combatants have the obligation to try to minimize civilian deaths. Israel’s actions are subject to its legal system and its military code of morals, whereas those of Hamas are unconstrained by any such considerations. We should welcome contributions that present impartial analysis and critique of the conduct of all parties to lethal conflicts. Jamaluddine and colleagues’ report on the Israel-Hamas conflict does not constitute such a contribution. When data is tortured, people are next.