By Seth Mandel
Thursday, February 19, 2026
Hamas has wrapped up its latest revision of
casualty data in the Gaza war, and it makes clear why Israel’s critics have
been flailing since the end of the war.
The list has enough information to cite 68,800 deaths.
Hamas has lost 25,000 fighters, which leaves 44,000 war deaths to account for.
Included in that 44,000 are about 10,000 natural deaths. The remaining 34,000
would include civilians killed by Israel and those killed by Hamas and
associated militant groups—either by execution, rocket misfires, turf wars, and
the like.
The result is that even when using Hamas’s numbers,
Israel’s civilian-to-combatant death rate is close to 1:1, an unheard-of
accomplishment in an urban war setting, let alone one in which much of the
territory has been turned into Hamas human shields. Given that Hamas started
the war, refused to surrender, and fired at Israel from civilian homes, the terrible
tragedy of Gazan lives lost is laid at Hamas’s feet.
It feels pretty silly at this point to even consider the
“genocide” accusation, but this is another opportunity to note that Hamas
goaded its defenders out on that limb and then personally cut it off under
their feet. While plenty of bad-faith actors have been accusing Israel of
genocide since the war started, and are therefore immune to facts, I’m sure
there are a number of decent folks who fell into the “genocide” trap because
they followed a trend in the name of “human rights.” I do not envy the humiliation
they are experiencing now, but neither do I find such people particularly
sympathetic. They ought to feel bad about what they’ve said and done, and I
hope they do.
The reason people were willing to believe it is twofold.
First, it is the quintessential example of the Big Lie. Hitler’s belief was
that the bigness of the lie not only lends it credibility but serves as an
emotional, rather than rational, appeal. As we watch Israeli companies flood Gaza with sweets
and drinks for Ramadan, we cannot maintain any rational, conscious
interpretation other than Israel won a defensive war while protecting civilians
to an extent never seen before. But those who shape their beliefs based on
subconscious appeals to emotion? Who knows what contradictions they can maintain.
The other reason is, yes, anti-Semitism. The public’s
willingness to believe the worst about Jews is not new, and it’s not an
accident. Those who have participated in the “genocide” Big Lie have not made
an honest mistake. A mistake, perhaps—but not an honest one.
For anyone who wants to put up guardrails for the next
time Hamasniks try to snare them in a massive hoax, the most important detail
in the new report is the demographics
chart. Women’s share of deaths is largely consistent with their share of
the total population, even below that for younger age groups. Military-aged
men, however, are a far larger share of fatalities than their share of the
population.
Which means another key part of the anti-Israel narrative
is definitive nonsense. That is the focus by Israel’s critics on “women and
children,” the narrative that claims the Jews are “baby killers.” When
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says
she opposes Israel because “I care about little kids dying”; when Rashida Tlaib
reads
into the congressional record what she says are the names of “babies that the
Israeli government has murdered”; when Elizabeth Warren tells a town
hall audience that Israel is committing genocide and to “look at the children”;
we are being fed the baby-killer trope from elected politicians.
It’s a lie, and a malignant one. Once again, Hamas’s own
numbers obliterate the lies that Western anti-Zionists cling to out of a misplaced
sense of pride. Indeed, one rarely encounters people with less to be proud of.
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