Debunking Hamas’ Lies on Gaza Death Toll with Military Expert Andrew Fox
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So we've got the hospital records and that is reliant on a dead body, which also makes some of the misreporting unforgivable because, you know, there's instances of 31 year olds being listed as one year olds. And that's very hard to do when you've got the body of a 31 year old in front of you. It's pretty tricky to classify mistakenly that body as a baby.

Hello and welcome to State of a Nation. I'm Elon Levy. This week the war in Gaza crossed a grim milestone. According to the Hamas health ministry, 45,000 people killed in Gaza since Hamas started this war with the October 7th massacre. How many of those were civilians and how many were Hamas terrorists? It matters. It matters because it affects how we understand the war that Israel is fighting.

If you think that they're all civilians, that would mean that Israel is targeting civilians and intentionally missing the terrorists. That's obviously wrong, but that's what many in the United Nations want you to believe. Officials there are inflating the figures even more than Hamas. Just this week, UN relief chief Tom Fletcher claiming that 45,000 civilians were killed.

He's proving an even bigger propagandist than Hamas itself, and I find it hard to believe he doesn't know he's telling a massive whopper. Because that's not something that even Hamas claims. But it's a line that we are hearing from people who are trying to pressure Israel to end the war with Hamas still in power and to abandon the hostages in Gaza.

And make no mistake, that's exactly what the demands for an unconditional ceasefire in Gaza mean. Demands like what we heard from the UN General Assembly. And so it's no surprise that people will twist the casualty figures to pressure Israel to leave Hamas standing from the war that it started. Now, for what it's worth, Hamas doesn't distinguish between civilians and combatants. But it claims that most of the dead are women and children.

But why should we trust a terror organization that massacred and abducted civilians on October 7th and then lied about it to the world media? Well, Major Andrew Fox doesn't believe them. He's a British Army veteran who saw action in Afghanistan. He's just published a new report through the Henry Jackson Society, questionable counting, analyzing the death toll from the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza. You can read it yourself online and we'll leave the link in the podcast notes.

Andrew is one of my favorite citizen sleuths, doing the hard investigative work that many journalists should be doing, but simply aren't. He finds in his report that Hamas has been inflating the numbers of women and children killed in the war, listing men as women, registering adults as children, even including natural deaths. His report finds that most of the casualties in Gaza have been fighting-age men.

And he concludes that the civilian to competent ratio, the number of civilians killed for every terrorist, is about 1:1. And that matters. Because if it's anywhere close to that, then this is obviously not a genocide. And that's an evil blood libel that is being told to save Hamas from the war that it started.

One peddled by countries like Ireland, which has taken such an extreme pro-Hamas position that it is asking the ICJ to redefine genocide just so that it can find Israel guilty of it. And it's definitely not Israel targeting civilians and it's definitely not Israel being indiscriminate. Instead, it's evidence of Israel's precision in going after Hamas in the most fiendishly difficult counter-terror battle the world has ever seen.

And stacked against absurd claims from NGOs and even UN officials, it shows just how far many people are willing to go in lying to save Hamas. And how far the media, which in most cases, his report finds, uncritically parrots Hamas numbers without even mentioning the IDF's figure of at least 17,000 terrorists killed. How far the media is complicit with this massive pressure campaign designed to save Hamas.

So Andrew Fox joins me from the UK to break down his report and to talk about how Israel's war against Hamas compares with what he himself has seen on the ground as a British soldier in Afghanistan. Let's dive beyond the headlines.

and between the lines. Ground control to Major Fox. Welcome to State of a Nation.

Thank you, Elon. Great to be here. It's good to have you. I've been meaning to get you on the podcast for a while, but we really set things in motion when you released this bombshell report about how the casualty figures in Gaza have been inflated. So we wanted to bring you on to dissect that report. But first of all, you really popped into all of our lives. I say our lives, particularly people following on Twitter. During the October 7th war, you've become a very vocal voice analyzing the war and

And so before we delve into the report, I just want to understand for our viewers, who are you? Where did you come from? And why have you taken such an acute interest in the October 7th war with Hamas?

So I was an army officer for 16 years. I served in the British army. I was a Royal Welsh Fusilier. Then I was in the Parachute Regiment. I did three tours in Afghanistan and a bunch of other places. But also after the 2021 fall of Kabul, I was really involved with helping Afghans who were at risk from Taliban reprisals escape from Kabul.

And the charity that I was working with, Azadi, we managed to extract about 3,000 people. But the key point for this is that we couldn't have done any of it without the UK's Jewish community, who rallied really hard around the cause. And I think the reason for that was that Jewish people remember what it was like to be persecuted. And they wanted to see if they could stop that happening to other people. Which meant I had some really close Jewish friends. And when October the 7th happened,

I saw the impact of them, that it had on them. I was appalled by the scenes in British streets celebrating the massacre.

So I was pretty keen to speak up for British Jewry effectively and try and be a vocal supporter of Britain's Jewish population and their right to live free from antisemitism. But on top of that, being a former soldier with a master's in war studies that's focused on Middle Eastern strategy, as well as having studied the psychology of disinformation, all of a sudden we had a war in the Middle East with strategic questions and loads of disinformation. So I had stuff to say.

And that got me an invite to April, in April to Israel. And that's the point where rather than just knowing, I actually understood. I think having walked those massacre sites and seen what they did to Be'eri and Nahalaz and all these other places that were ruined by Hamas on 7th of October, I really understood that.

the nature of the war that Israel was fighting rather than just the enemy they were fighting. And that's a really critical point that I found so refreshing about your perspective. It's about the nature of the war.

Because so often what we hear from various human rights organizations or observers, they manage to analyze a war without talking to a single military expert who's seen combat with his own eyes. And you have, and you understand the battlefield. And that really comes across in the way that you have been tweeting and writing and analyzing the battlefield that Israel faces fighting Hamas.

So look, I want to dive into your report that you published for the Henry Jackson Society, Questionable Counting, analyzing the death toll from the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza. This has been something that many people have been saying for a long time, that Hamas has been inflating the casualties.

There was a Washington Institute report earlier in the war. But apart from that, the evidence seemed very anecdotal. And this is the first time that anyone has really put everything together in one document. But before we dive in and understand what you found, I want to first ask you why you think this matters at all.

Obviously, truth is important. Truth matters. Obviously, every human life is sacred and it matters exactly how many people were killed.

But at the end of the day, in the context of an argument about the legality of Israel's military actions against Hamas, or an argument about the morality of Israel's actions against Hamas, or even in the context of a propaganda war against Israel that is trying to save Hamas from the war that it started, why does it matter?

If the real casualty number is a few percentage points off from what it is in real life. The fact of the matter is a lot of people, including a lot of innocent people, are still dead. Absolutely. And the last thing we've tried to do in this is to diminish that loss and that tragedy that is every single war ever fought.

where humans have taken other human beings' lives. It is a truly dreadful thing. I've been to Gaza myself. I've seen the devastation and the destruction. And even though I was a relatively experienced soldier when I went there, it still shocked me. So the last thing we ever want to do is take away from that tragedy. We're not really quibbling the total too much. What we're really quibbling is the demographics inside the total because that matters because it frames the entire war.

If Israel has killed 45,000 civilians and zero members of Hamas,

That suggests a very different intent and methodology of prosecuting the war to if they, as we believe, have killed about 50-50 Hamas and then civilians as collateral damage. It speaks to the ICJ case. It speaks to the ICC case. It speaks to accusations of genocide. And it speaks to the morality of Israel's cause. If they are wantonly slaughtering civilians, then clearly that's something nobody can support.

So I think it's very important that when the media is framing this, they need to do that in a way that acknowledges that this is a war between two combatants. They have platformed only one combatant for 14 months. 98% of media articles cite Hamas's figures and 3% cite Israel's comments about how many fighters they think they've killed.

That disparity is absolutely morally wrong. It's a failure of journalism. And it all hinges on how many civilians and innocents have died, and more importantly, how they've died and why. That's an important point, I think, because...

Because so much of the analysis has been focusing on that headline figure instead of drilling down into the numbers of how they're divided between civilian and combatants. And of course, if you're right, that the civilian to combatant ratio is one to one, one civilian killed for every combatant, of course, completely belies the absurd accusation that Israel is combatant.

committing genocide, God forbid, or deliberately targeting civilians or being indiscriminate. None of those would end up achieving a one-to-one ratio that you indeed find. But I'll add to the question of why this matters exactly what the ratio is.

The fact is all those people, whether civilian or competent, they would all still be alive today if Hamas had not launched a needless war on October 7th and if it didn't fight that war from inside and under civilian areas. At the end of the day, whether it's one-to-one or 1.5 to one, it doesn't change the question of responsibility, which is what really matters, which is that, from my perspective at least, Hamas

Hamas is responsible for the fact this war started and for the way this war is being fought. Of course, and people have completely overlooked Hamas over the last 14 months. They've almost completely absented themselves from commentary on this conflict. It's almost as if it's just entirely one way. Israel is just bombing chunks of Gaza, targeting whoever they want, which is deeply bizarre because if you speak to any IDF soldier who's been on the ground, I'm sure you have, they'll tell you about the enemy they're fighting. They'll tell you about

booby traps in the way that Hamas embeds itself in the civilian population. And yet none of that, and bearing in mind that all war crimes, none of that gets reported, certainly in the Western media. And it really is, as I said, it's a startling failure of journalism over the last 14 months in the way this has been presented as such a one-sided affair when it's Hamas who started it.

Understand. So this analysis is important regardless of the question of responsibility for this war.

Because the way that we break down the civilian to competent ratio and who exactly has been killed matters for how we frame this war. And that matters because there is intense international pressure on Israel to end the war that Hamas started in a way that would, one, abandon the hostages. I mean, that was the demand of the UN General Assembly when they called for an unconditional ceasefire, but also leave the Hamas terror regime in power, which is, of course, unacceptable to us.

So look, talk me through the key findings in your report. How far do you think that the death toll presented by the Hamas Ministry of Health has been inflated? How do you calculate what the civilian to competent ratio is? How many civilians do you believe have really been killed in this war versus how many Hamas terrorist militants, whatever we call them?

Yeah, so we're not hugely quibbling the 45,000 figure. We don't have the ability to rip that to pieces in every single possible way. But we know there's double accounting. We know that there are people who have died for causes other than the war. And of course, these lists, when you translate it from Arabic, state that every single person on the list was murdered by the IDF, which is clearly deeply loaded language anyway. Under the law of armed conflict, it's not murder when you kill enemy combatants. So the way it's framed by Hamas,

Yeah, it is deeply suspect.

you know, the fact that we found cancer patients, the fact that we found men listed as women, the fact that ages have been taken off huge tranches of 18 year olds to make them 17 year olds and therefore children, according to the list. It's one of two things. It's either really cynical data manipulation or it's just a bunch of errors they've made because recording dead names is really hard in a war zone. But either way, it makes the numbers unreliable. So when the UN make a comment that 70% are women and children,

What they're not looking at is, for example, the proportions of men, women and children before the war started. And I think the most key finding in the report, if we take into account that the population of Gaza was 26% men, adult men, before the war started, if Israel was killing indiscriminately, we would be expecting to see about 26% male fatalities, but we're not, depending on which country.

method of of uh of recording Hamas use if it's hospital registered it's 42% men if it's family notifications using the online form it's 62% men which I think is a really big deal and if it's judicial committee then it's 53% men and so we're seeing at least double the amount of male deaths that we would expect to see um and by the same token we've looked at natural deaths um

We know that disproportionately old people are dying in Gaza. So the idea that the demographics for that don't line up. We're not suggesting that 5,000 of the names on that list are cancer patients or natural deaths, but we know there are some. And so when we're being, you know, when we're having a conversation about the demographics, which is key to the accusation of genocide, we have to be very, very careful relying on these reports. And the world's media just simply isn't doing that. They're not doing their due diligence.

Well, hang on. How do you account for that? The men listed as women, the adults registered as children, the inclusion of natural deaths. Do you think that there is a deliberate effort here on the part of Hamas and the health authorities in Gaza in order to inflate the overall fatalities, in order to inflate the number who are reported as civilians? Or is this just fog of war? There is genuine chaos in a reality in which, let's be honest, the health care system is breaking down as a way...

Particularly as a result of the way Hamas has been fighting out of those hospitals.

Well, it could be either. And I don't have any evidence one way or the other. The key point is that it's there and we've identified it. Now, if we look at Hamas's broader strategy, we've seen the faked casualty videos. We know their strategy from the very start has been to try and activate that kind of weaponized Western empathy against Israel in order to discredit Israel on the international stage. And it's been spectacularly successful.

and these casualty statistics have been a really big feature of that campaign. So

I think we could make a fairly stiff assessment that it's very likely that Hamas know the power of these numbers and are doing everything they can to paint Israel in as bad a light as possible. I mean, as far as we understand, does this count include the 500 people Hamas claimed were killed by an Israeli airstrike on the Al-Ahli Hospital at the beginning of the war, which turned out not to be an Israeli airstrike, not to have flattened the hospital, and definitely not to have killed 500 people?

It's a tough one because obviously when they listed the 500 that they thought, well, they alleged had died that we know to be false, they didn't give us their names. What we do know is that the death count went up by a significant amount that day. So we can say there's a correlation, but we can't pinpoint that to al-Akhlih.

But the al-Akhirah incident is a great example of the way Hamas exaggerates casualties. And that was actually what put this first on my radar was those rapid and immediate fatality reports in the early days of the war. Now, I know what it's like to be around airstrikes. You know, the closest I've been to one is a danger close at 500 meters.

With multiple ones of those coming in, you're not going to be going forward and counting bodies and having that really accurate death state that they were pushing out at the time. And so straight from the start of the war, we know they've been lying. They can't possibly have the numbers that they say they had. And that, therefore, I think costs huge credibility on anything they put out.

Because once you've been caught lying once, then that's your credibility. I mean, right at the beginning of the war, Hamas was claiming that 70% of the fatalities were women and children. And then when the list of identified names was released, that went down dramatically. What happened there? And what is your best assessment of how many are civilians, and particularly how many have been women and children as a result of this war?

Yeah, so when the UN took that off, it's because they realized that Hamas were not confirming them in the right way. And the media sources they were using to identify fatalities weren't perhaps as reliable as they might have been. And so the UN had to do a fairly humiliating climb down, having been trumpeting these numbers almost without question since the start of the war.

Now, we deliberately left our predictions of the totals out of this report because we tried to keep it as primary source as possible. For the most part, the data we've used for our analysis in this report is Hamas's own numbers. And I think that's really important because if you challenge them, you're effectively challenging Hamas's own data.

But the calculations we did come to, and there's a bit of assumption and speculation here, but we were working roughly to 22,500 combatants died. So I think the IDF are underestimating publicly. 7,500 adult male non-combatants, and then about 15,000 female and children non-combatants. So it works out to about 50-50 combatants and non-combatants. And that is a horrible number to read aloud. The idea that

15,000 women and children are dead is truly appalling. But it's not 70% of the total. And whilst we can take an objective moral line and say that it's all appalling, whether it's 70% or whether it's 50%, that's still dreadful.

It does, however, speak to the wider context of the war, the way Israel is prosecuting it and who and why Israel is targeting people. And I want to get your understanding as a former combat soldier yourself about the nature of the battlefield and how we ended up with these numbers that are

frankly deeply deeply upsetting no matter how one looks at it that the civilian numbers of course the hamas casualty numbers are not upsetting there should be more um but you claim that there are 22 000 dead hamas terrorists which is in fact higher than the latest figure that the idf has released i'm wondering first of all how does the idf come to an assessment of the number of people uh

It has killed the number of terrorists it's killed. That was one question I remember being asked in an interview. Piers Morgan was particularly insistent on it. You can't know how many Hamas terrorists you've killed. And I reminded him that when his brother fought in Afghanistan, he didn't have a running bean counter of the number of terrorists he'd killed either. Yeah.

How does the IDF reach an assessment of how many it's killed? And how do you reach an assessment that's higher than the IDF's own assessment and think the IDF has been more successful than it thinks it has been? Yeah, so really interestingly, the IDF,

were really, really challenging to work with over the writing of this report. When I say work with, they were challenging to get data from. I was asking them for justification for their 17,000 to 20,000 totals and nobody could give it to me. And I pestered everyone up to and including Yoav Gallant in person. And the data wasn't forthcoming. But what they did do was give me a briefing on how they do that battle damage assessment, as it's called. And really, it's identical to the way that the British or the American army would do it. So,

Let's start with airstrikes. You know who you're targeting when you target someone in an airstrike. You've got an eye in the sky. You've got incredibly good optics on modern aircraft and modern drones and modern helicopters. So you know who you're shooting at. You'll have a target pack worked up.

The target will be identified. You'll follow a process that lets you decide whether or not you're going to use a helicopter or a plane or a drone strike, what munition you're going to use, and whether or not the strike can go ahead. Because I've seen the Israeli process, and it works identically to ours, where they look at potential collateral damage. And if it's too high, they call it off. And the Israeli Air Force briefed me that they'd cancelled one in every two airstrikes during this war due to civilian proximity.

So we've got that option. We know who we've struck. We can then put a drone in. You're saying that when the army is deciding whether to authorize an airstrike, it's on the basis of intelligence about terrorists they know to be there or can see with the drones. And therefore, once there's an airstrike and they've killed the terrorists, they have an assessment of the body count based on how many they were expecting to kill.

Exactly so, or they can put a drone over the top and have a look at the wreckage and see if they can see bodies. And there's a way of counting there. Obviously, some might be collateral, and that's for the image analysts to try and work out. So that's option one. Option two, when we're talking about the army, the ground troops,

They do the same as we do and they have debriefs after contact. So once you've had a reorganization following a mission, you'll talk about how many people you think you killed. And that may well be overinflated. It may well be underinflated. Because soldiers, I mean, know how many people they hit. They're in face-to-face urban combat. Someone shoots at them from out of a window. They fire, you know, they fire back at them into the building and they know whether they have a hit or not, right? Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. So don't get me wrong, it is chaotic. I can remember a reorg in Afghanistan when my section commanders and I couldn't even agree on which direction the rounds had been coming at us from. You know, it is a very chaotic and challenging situation on the battlefield. So there's never going to be an accurate, accurate, accurate count. And the reason I think our numbers are higher than the IDF's is I think the IDF are deliberately pitching low because you don't want to claim more than you've got and then be found out later down the line.

Additionally, ours relies on a lot of kind of assumptions and conjecture looking at trends throughout the war. So we've looked at the figures, we've looked at how many have died, we've looked at what we roughly think the differences is, and we've tried to distill it down to comparing it to other types of urban conflicts. So there's a lot of kind of statistical working in the actual documents about seven years long. - I mean, without getting too deep into the statistical weeds, how did you reach that number?

So we looked at, you know, the vast majority of Gaza's men at the start of the war weren't in Hamas. We know there were 40,000 fighters and we're talking about the Al-Qassam Brigade. It was about 2% of the population. I mean, that's a very large armed force for such a small population. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, they were a formed army at the start of the war. Now they're a terrorist insurgent force.

And it's what they were designed to do. It's something like that attack on Israel and then defend Gaza City afterwards. So we were kind of assuming that male noncombatants were dying at the same rate as non-male noncombatants. So if you assume that collateral damage is split evenly across the demographics, so women, men, children who are not fighting will probably die at roughly the same rate.

Right. There's no reason to think that a woman or a man or a child is being accidentally killed at a higher rate than the others. We would assume that among all the collateral damage, I hate that phrase, it's horrible, but among all the non-combatant deaths, they would be reflective of their split in the general population. Okay, I understand that. Yeah. And so from that, you can roughly extrapolate the figures based on how many people have died.

So I don't quite understand. So how did you end up reaching the 22,000 figure for the number of terrorists who were killed? Okay, so two groups in Gaza. There are women and all children, and they're about 67% of the population, which is about 1.34 million. Then you've got the males age 13 plus, which is about 33% of the population, which is about 660,000.

We can calculate from the death records that about 15,000 women and children except boys died of all causes. And we can do that from the death records.

We know that from public notices, we're assuming that 100% of those people were non-combatants. So we then have to look at how we work out the combatants. The vast majority of Gaza's men weren't in Hamas. So assuming that they're dying at the same rate, we can work out that 7,400 men would have died. And then the remainder must have been Hamas fighters.

I see. So overall, you reach the conclusion that we're talking about a ratio of roughly one to one. And I want to pick your brains about how that works out in an international context, and in particular, in the wars that you've been fighting. But when we look at the headline figure, you say you don't have any major quibbles, so to speak, with the headline figure of around 45,000 people killed. You think half of those were Hamas terrorists and

We can argue about who has responsibility for overall deaths. I think you and I would agree that Hamas bears primary responsibility. But I was trawling through the cesspit that is Twitter, which is where we met, where you have received quite a backlash for this report from people who are not happy with the conclusions that you draw. And one of the recurring themes among your critics is that the Gaza health ministry headline figure is not...

is not overestimated, it's understated. And that in fact, there are one

vast numbers of indirect deaths. And famously, there was the nonsense piece in The Lancet that took the Hamas numbers, multiplied them by five for no obvious reason, and claimed that there could in future be 186,000 deaths. But anyway, people claim that there are indirect deaths that haven't been accounted for. And there is also a claim about uncounted bodies lying under the rubble. So I wonder what you make about this criticism that in fact,

The number that Hamas is giving us understates the number of people who've been killed in this war that it started.

I mean, this whole criticism is something of a straw man because we're not trying to put a figure on how many people have died. We're trying to make it very clear that the majority of, or at least half of them, are Hamas fighters. And I've explained the importance of that already. But to deal with the many under the rubble, you know, for months, even the UN, who are basing their figures on Hamas, are only claiming 10,000 under the rubble, which is still a lot of people, but it's certainly not hundreds of thousands.

There's no evidence that there's hundreds of thousands under the rubble. And the really obvious reason for that is that Israel has evacuated most people. These critics can't have it both ways and claim ethnic cleansing of over a million people and then claim that those people are then buried under rubble. You know, Israel's humanitarian evacuations have extracted the vast majority of civilians out of urban areas before the IDF assaults properly.

And the same people making this criticism have criticized the images of people fleeing the combat areas. And I've spoken and interviewed... Right, you can't both claim that Israel is targeting civilians while also accusing it of constantly asking them to move. Exactly so. And you speak to IDF soldiers, they talk about how they're essentially fighting in ghost towns. You know, these are very empty areas, less Hamas fighters when they're clearing through.

In terms of stating that perhaps we're undercounting, like I said, we haven't tried to put a figure on this. We're not saying that 45,000 is wrong. We're saying that half of them are Hamas fighters and that demographically it is not majority women and children being killed proportionally. It is men of fighting age. Another of the criticisms that has been leveled against you is

is that the Hamas health ministry figures have proven generally reliable in the past and that the IDF doesn't dispute them. I wonder what you make of that. Well, I'm actually really glad you brought that up. That's one of my favorite chapters in the report because you hear this all the time. They've been right in the past. They've been right in the past. Our report has proven that to be exactly the same as today, where the rough total is approximately correct, but they've concealed fighter deaths.

And we even looked at various old Facebook posts from the 2014 war, and we even found one where Hamas explicitly on Facebook tell Gaza's civilians when they're reporting deaths or talking to journalists not to mention that somebody they knew who died was a combatant.

So actually, I would say that they've been reliable before in the sense that they're proving our point for us. This is exactly the pattern they followed with CAST-led 2014 and the other conflicts that have happened in Gaza. So that argument, I think, actually reinforces our points rather than theirs. I mean, one might say that

The one-to-one civilian to combatant ratio is unprecedented in the history of warfare. Famously, the United Nations has said that it's closer to nine to one in wars. But you mentioned caste-led in 2008. Back then, Hamas claimed that only 48 of the casualties of a total 1,300 dead were combatants.

Israel identified 709 Hamas names. And then it wasn't until November, 2010 that Hamas admitted that around 600 to 700 of the people who had been killed were, uh,

And so by Hamas's own numbers in 2008, having lied about the civilian to combatant ratio, it admitted that this was perhaps the most proportionate and precise war in history. We found the same in 2014 in Operation Protective Edge when Hamas claimed that 70% of the people who were killed had been civilians and civilians.

And open source investigation by the Meir Amit Center found that, in fact, 55% were combatants. And they did that from an analysis of names. Same happened again in 2001. And 2018, the border riots, when Sinoir famously, or not famously because people forget this happened, but Sinoir urged people to storm the border and rip the hearts out of the Jews' chests,

Hamas claimed at the time that around 50 people were killed and it later admitted that 50 out of the total 62 were in fact its members. So you have this recurring pattern here. So even if it is true that Hamas's figures have been generally reliable in the past, the headline figure, that's not true regarding the civilian to combatant ratio. And your report concludes that they've been lying about that again.

But I do want to quibble actually with this claim that Hamas figures have been generally reliable in the past because they're counting them differently this time, aren't they? In the past, they have been based on hospital records. And this time, Hamas...

produces its numbers on the basis of media reports and even self-reporting on Google forms. So tell me, how does Hamas reach this number that you say is inflating the civilian casualty rate? Yeah, so as you correctly identify, they've got three reporting mechanisms. And also the difference with this war is they've got no third-party oversight.

which they've had in the past. And that's given, I think, a degree of credibility to their previous reporting that is unjustifiably carried forward to this war. And essentially, they're pushing out updates on a sort of weekly basis, and the UN are catching up with that, and that's the number that the UN, OCHA, put on their website. Hamas then released, they've released, I believe, six or seven so far, long lists of names,

which are far below the number shown on the UN OCHA site because of the 10,000 allegedly buried in the rubble, which is entirely plausible. And it's these lists of names where people are getting the breakdown of men, women, and children from. And so how has Hamas been reaching that number? How has it been counting people in the chaos of war? Where does this number come from in the first place? Yeah, so we've got the hospital records, and that is reliant on a dead body.

Which also makes some of the misreporting unforgivable because, you know, there are those instances of 31 year olds being listed as one year olds. And that's very hard to do when you've got the body of a 31 year old in front of you. It's pretty tricky to classify mistakenly that body as a baby.

So you've got the hospital records. They've had real problems with that system. The computer system went down in November 23. It's only relatively recently come back online and a lot of mistakes and inaccuracies potentially have been fixed since that computer system came online. You've then got information sources, which is the subject of some controversy, I think, because the head of Hamas' health ministry is claiming that

They don't use media sources where actually not only in other interviews and in their own press releases, they have used the phrase media sources. So the GMO, the government media office, have been putting out numbers based on essentially stuff they found online or on social media. And then finally, you've got the public submission of information, which is using this online Microsoft documents form that can be filled in by anyone.

They're not supposed to put those on the death lists unless they're verified by a panel of judges. But on the list that we looked at, out of nearly 10,000 names that have been submitted by this form, only around under 2,000 had actually been verified by Hamas judges. Not that I consider Hamas judges to be the extreme arbiters of fairness and justice.

but they're not even following their own data. And even, you know, according to their own classifications of data, where they say that if data is missing, it's, you know, it's technically incomplete. They've still gone ahead and listed it on the death statistics. So there's some real flaws in their methodology here. And, you know, it makes me deeply uncomfortable with the totals they've pushed out. And it should make everyone uncomfortable with relying on these figures with this many methodological flaws, as well as clear inaccuracies.

Right. Hamas's methodology has not been transparent at all, quite unlike your methodology, which is very clearly stated in your very comprehensive report. And in this report, you reach the conclusion that the civilian to competent ratio is around one to one. You reach that on the basis of an assessment that around 22,000 terrorists have been killed, which admittedly is more than the IDF is saying publicly. And I do want to linger just a moment on this number. A

Because it does seem to me that that assessment, plus minus, is broadly credible. And it's broadly credible because of other evidence that is coming to us about the nature of the war. When we consider that CNN's own analysis, which I think understated the IDF's military gains, found that two-thirds of Hamas's battalions had been destroyed or degraded, that would seem to be consistent with the assessment that around half of their terrorists have been killed.

I remember back in January 2024, the Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. intelligence had independently estimated that around 20 to 30 percent of Hamas fighters had been killed, which was consistent with the IDF's body count at the time, around 9,000 killed. And this was nearly a year ago. Of course, it's been months now that U.S. intelligence has been saying that the IDF has mostly finished the job.

Now, it does sound, of course, callous to be talking about civilian to combatant ratios because, you know, there's a lot of talk about the fact that the Hamas has been defeated.

Why does a ratio matter if these are real lives, real human beings? And yet still we have to talk about war in the context of other wars. And this clearly establishes this is a war in which I believe shows quite clearly the IDF has been taking unprecedented measures to try to keep civilians safe, definitely not targeting them, definitely not trying to kill as many as possible. If it is indeed one-to-one, how does that compare with other counter-terror operations?

Specifically, Afghanistan, Iraq, the fight against ISIS. How many civilians were killed for every combatant in those wars? I'm actually broadly uncomfortable with the ratio arguments. I know Bibi has made a big deal of it when he was speaking to Congress. Because actually, it doesn't, in a legal sense, doesn't matter what the ratio is. What matters is how those non-combatants died.

Were they targeted or were they under the law of armed conflict and international humanitarian law, were they legally collateral damage? Like I said, we've agreed that we don't like that term, but it's the legal phrase, so I'll use it in this very specifically legal context. If Israel were targeting civilians, a lot more civilians would be dead. 45 would be a drop in the ocean compared to what the capability of the IDF is to annihilate large numbers of people.

And that's a reason why comparing this war to other wars is perhaps challenging because the IDF is technologically, if not the most advanced army in the world, certainly in the top two. The capabilities they have are absolutely outstanding. And the idea that they'd only kill 45,000 people in 14 months if they were trying to slaughter en masse is just beyond derision.

Now in Afghanistan, we had a very different policy. For example, we were deliberately trying to win the hearts and minds of the population. It wasn't a war in the sense that Gaza is where you're trying to actively kill the enemy is your priority. And so at times in Afghanistan, we had a zero tolerance for collateral damage, but it was a very different type of conflict. And so I think,

First of all, the ratio piece is kind of not hugely useful other than as a broad comparator. But also that comparator is impacted by the fact that different wars have different natures. So comparing Afghanistan and Gaza is a pretty false comparison.

Right. So if I understand correctly, the ratio itself does not attest to the legality of military action. A one-to-one ratio could be legal, could be illegal. A five-to-one ratio could be legal, could be illegal. It all depends on the precise decisions behind each strike. But it certainly does point to...

an attempt at precision in a fiendishly difficult urban environment. It points to the fact the IDF is trying to kill as few civilians as possible and more are killed than it wants, whereas Hamas is trying to kill as many civilians as possible and fewer are killed than it is trying. But still, it is important to understand the Battle of Gaza in an international context. I mean, do we know how many civilians were killed?

in the UK and US war in Afghanistan? It's not a stat I have at my fingertips. I think it was in the vicinity of 100,000, but I'd have to go back and check that for you. And as a ratio versus combatants? I mean, just to illustrate the nature of precision and the ability to target terrorists and avoid collateral damage.

I mean, look, what I think you're inadvertently proving here is the level of scrutiny that Israel is under. I don't think we even remotely started to keep those records in Afghanistan. Anything we look at now in hindsight would probably be kind of Wikipedia level knowledge. You know, I don't think anyone held in-depth figures on how many combatants or how many civilians were killed in that war. Sorry, you're telling me Britain doesn't know how many people it killed in the war in Afghanistan?

I don't think we could tell you how many fighters we killed over the 10 years of combat operations in Afghanistan. I'd be very surprised if we held that figure. And yet, during this war, it is expected of Israel to have a running bean counter of exactly how many people are killed in real time. Yeah, exactly. And it's a criticism that I've made repeatedly over the last year and a bit, that Israel is being held to a completely unrealistic and unreasonable and unfair standard that no other army in the world has been held to.

What about the war against ISIS, for example? Um...

The Battle of Mosul is often invoked as the best comparison for the Battle of Gaza. Although, of course, there are huge differences. You're talking about 3,000 terrorists, not 40,000, one city, not seven. They didn't have an underground network of tunnels. There was a hinterland to which civilians could escape. They weren't firing rockets at the US and other countries. They weren't holding hostages. They were despised by the local population. And yet there...

No one really knows exactly how many civilians, exactly how many terrorists were killed, but it's generally around three to one is the estimate that I'm seeing online. Is that consistent with your understanding of what the civilian to combatant ratio was like in the battle against ISIS, which is perhaps the best comparison we have to the war against Hamas?

Yeah, in Mosul they estimate about 9,000 civilians were killed. In terms of how many Islamic states, again, I don't have that figure. And the reason I don't have that figure is because

I'm very skeptical of comparison from war A to war B. And this might be a hangover of mine from having been a soldier in Afghanistan where we constantly had Malaya rammed down our throats as the be-all and end-all of counterinsurgency. Why aren't you more like the Malayan conflict? And actually, when you look at what happened in Malaya, the reason we won that counterinsurgency is because we stuck everyone in camps and then killed everyone outside the camps.

It's not something we could ever repeat today under modern norms of warfare. So I'm super skeptical about comparison between war A and war B. Actually, all I care about is each individual strike. Was it legal? Was it proportionate? And that builds up to a much bigger picture. And so I'm glad you've come around to that because you mentioned both your experience as a soldier in Afghanistan and the specific legality of each strike. So

Help me understand then the civilian deaths, however many there are, clearly a dispute between your methodology and Hamas's. Governments around the world insisting that civilians be protected, that Israel ensure their safety.

Which is an unrealistic and not particularly law-based demand because armies have to take steps to mitigate harm to civilians. They cannot keep civilians safe. I mean, I remember an interview in which I was asked, you know, where in Gaza is safe? And I said, in disbelief, obviously nowhere because it's a war zone and it will be safe...

when the war is over. I mean, until then, there is nowhere where you can guarantee safety in a war zone. And I think Channel 4 was particularly horrified by this admission from an Israeli government spokesman that nowhere in Gaza is safe.

But that's the nature of a war, one we didn't start, one we didn't want. But anyway, so much of the analysis, so many of the demands we're seeing from international leaders seem divorced from the reality of what war is actually like. So I want to get your perspective as someone who's seen war. By and large, people in Gaza are killed in one of two ways. There's open combat with troops on the ground, and there are airstrikes that are called in from the sky.

Help me understand the battlefield that the IDF discovered in Gaza on October 8th, when it gets lured into a battle to bring down Hamas and bring back the hostages immediately after the October 7th massacre. What trap had Hamas laid for the IDF in terms of how it had rigged the battlefield? So I was really fortunate to go to Glilot, to the intelligence base there, and be shown some of the intelligence that was recovered from Gaza.

And I think it is broadly misunderstood on the international stage that at the start of the war, Hamas and the Al-Qassam and Al-Quds brigades were an army. The whole of Gaza City and the reason, you know, there was a real confusion as to why Gaza City was the first part of the operation and not Rafah. And the reason it was Gaza City is because it was what's called the center of gravity. This is where

the bulk and the massive fighting forces were gathered. They were dug into defensive positions. They had defensive plans, and I've seen the sketch maps, exactly as we would do in a defensive position. They had details down to the last soldier and the last amount of ammunition and the amounts of weapons they had at each location within Gaza City. And it was a really in-depth and detailed defensive plan designed to stop an IDF incursion from east to west.

Now, what the IDF very cleverly did was go the other way. They went down the coast and effectively turned left from west to east. And that essentially completely dislocated Hamas's defensive positions. But what we've seen... Sorry, just to take a step back, how was Hamas expecting the IDF to enter Gaza? I think they were expecting, looking at the way their defensive dispositions were laid down, they were expecting the IDF to come east.

from that eastern border of Gaza into Gaza City. Meaning from the direction of land? Yes. And how did the IDF enter? So they went all the way to the coast around Zikim and then came south down the coast. By entering Gaza from the top, you mean? Exactly, from the north. Came all the way down through that kind of border just past Erez where it was destroyed. And then they turned left. So you're heading south, you turn left, so you're going west. And they attacked essentially from behind.

Okay, so we digress. Talk to me about the battlefield and the way that Hamas had very cleverly dug its defenses and military fortifications into Gaza's urban cityscape. Yeah, I think it's a very fair assessment to say that this is possibly the most complicated environment that any army has ever had to fight in. And, you know, we can look at the rubble of Stalingrad,

But apart from that, the complexity of this urban environment is actually unbelievable. It's a 360 degree battle in every direction. So if you're on ground level, you've got buildings above you. You might have rubble in front of you so it no longer looks like the map that you had before you went in because the buildings are turned to rubble. There's a huge tunnel network that runs underneath your feet. So you're in 365 degrees in every direction.

You're spinning like a top the whole time trying to work out where the enemy are. And the tunnel network is designed for maneuver. And we know that because they're broadly straight. If there were defensive tunnels designed to be fought in, they would look like World War I trenches underground. I understand. So these tunnels are in fact not places for Hamas to hide under civilian areas, so to speak, but to massively move troops underground.

underneath the fityscape. It's both. It's both. They're not expecting to set up defensive positions underground and have the IDF fight through them. That's not what they're for. But they are there to hide in from airstrikes and they are to maneuver from point A to point B. And the way the tunnels are set up is there is a long central tunnel and then there are spines coming off it into people's houses and homes. And Hamas's leadership set up a situation in the tunnels where they could go from their homes to the local shop, to the office,

And then back again without ever leaving the tunnels, without ever seeing daylight. It was an incredibly complicated underground system, as we know, longer than the London Underground, longer than the New York subway, longer than the Paris metro in terms of kilometers or miles. And what does that mean for the nature of how the IDF is targeting Hamas and why we might end up seeing civilian casualties there?

from the nature of Israel fighting an enemy that is heavily fortified and moving forces under people's homes and into people's homes.

Well, if you're going to strike those tunnels, you're going to end up damaging and destroying the infrastructure they're attached to. So to hit the subterranean, unfortunately, it does involve damage and destruction to what's above it. And what's above it is homes, mosques, hospitals, former schools, universities, and the like. So this tunnel system is designed, it's essentially trying to use that civilian infrastructure as top cover for their maneuver underground. And on top of that,

if we look at

how the operation has sort of evolved for the IDF over time, they've had to develop almost a new method of fighting. So simultaneous subterranean and overground maneuver. So coordinating the movements of their forces above and below ground whilst combining that with air power, combining it with artillery, combining it with use of drones to observe what's going on, having to consider perhaps leaving some tunnel entrances clear so that fighters can flee to the surface where they can be either captured or killed.

And the operational speed at which Israel is now moving through the tunnels is remarkable. It's something that would have taken a month at the start of the war is now taking a few days. And I spoke to Major General Goldfuss, who is the commander of 96th Division. And he was saying that his troops in some cases can now move faster underground in Hamas tunnels than they can on the surface. So it's been a heck of a learning curve.

for the IDF and they've adapted to this incredibly complex and challenging environment very impressively from a military perspective. Right, Hamas thought the IDF would never enter the tunnels and I remember at the start of the war the thought that they might enter booby-trapped tunnels seemed almost unthinkable and now you're saying that they're actually maneuvering through them. But in terms of civilian casualties and the legality of military strikes, it would appear

at least from media reporting, that much of it is coming not from face-to-face combat with soldiers on the ground, but from airstrikes. And when an airstrike is made, the army will have to make a proportionality assessment, whether that strike is proportional, whether it's legal. Talk me through what steps are taken in the IDF to understand whether an airstrike would be legal and how that compares to what you saw within the British Army and other NATO militaries.

It's almost identical. I've looked at the processes. They're incredibly similar. So it starts with the intelligence that creates the target. You have a variety of different means of gathering intelligence. I'm hearing from the IDF that Gaza has seen a renaissance in human intelligence. Armies were tending towards technological intelligence, such as signals or imagery intelligence, but huge amounts of human intelligence on the ground in Gaza from Gazans coming up to them and telling them where the enemy are.

But once you've got that target... That's interesting. That's something I actually hadn't heard much about. Could you elaborate to what extent have... I mean, we've seen anecdotally people in Gaza expressing intense dissatisfaction at Hamas, blaming them for the disaster that they brought on them. But to what extent are they in fact snitching on Hamas and why haven't they helped us find the hostages yet? Yeah, I mean, I'm probably at the limit of what I can actually say publicly on that one, if I'm brutally honest.

The last thing I want to do is risk jeopardizing the way that those operations are working. So I'll probably just leave it there and say that they have told me there's a renaissance in human intelligence. But moving on down the intelligence sort of process, that target will be hand-wired. Back to the question of airstrikes.

Yeah, back to the question of airstrikes. The target will be analyzed based on the intelligence available. You'll normally try and get two or three ways of confirming a target if you can. So you try not to rely on single source intelligence wherever possible. So for example, once someone has told you that Hamas are in building A, you'd probably put a drone up over building A to see what you could see and you'd what we call soak that target to try and identify pattern of life.

The IDF have then got the civilian harm mitigation cell, which is an incredible technological achievement where they can basically break Gaza down into a couple of hundred different little cells, work out what the occupation is on a normal day, and then look at what the occupation of that area is now. So they'll have a good idea of how many civilians are present and if that's a lot or a few.

And then you'll start working up the best way to hit that target. Now, it might be that actually a ground maneuver operation is the better option, in which case you'd stand down the Air Force and send in a platoon or a company of troops. But if you then decide that an airstrike is the way forward, you would first of all pass the target to the lawyers and say, is this a target we can legally hit? Here's all the information we've got about the target. And curiously, actually, the IDF lawyers actually

commanders are legally bound to follow their advice whereas in the British army it's just advisory which is which I found very interesting um once the lawyers have given their tick in the box to the targeting process uh they would then select um the means by which they're going to strike that target so it could be anything from a two thousand pound bomb right down to one of the um one of the very very small rockets which which can be accurate to

you know, half a meter and can take out a room in a building and leave the rest of the structure untouched. And through all of that, you will have taken into account the likely civilian casualties. And the rationale you have to decide on whether it's proportionate or not is does the value of that target, the value I've placed on that target in military terms, can I justify the amounts of civilians that I think will likely die as a result of me striking that target?

And then once the target has been struck, you would then do a battle damage assessment to work out exactly what happened, how many people were actually killed, how much damage was done, and whether you've destroyed the target that you wanted to destroy. What does that mean in that assessment? How can I justify how many civilians are killed? It sounds entirely subjective. I mean, what is a proportionate strike? One combatant justifies three civilians, 10 civilians, 100 civilians. How does one...

create a proportionality assessment and then how does one monitor and criticize a proportionality assessment and tell an army you got it wrong on what metric can you assess whether that strike was legal and here's the real rub it is subjective and that's the point there's no table of contents that tells you if you want to kill three hamas fighters then that means you're allowed to kill 15 civilians that's absolutely not how it's framed um

a really good example would be say sinwa hadn't been flushed out of his tunnels like a rat and and shot dead in a building say there was a an airstrike and actually let's switch dave the day of airstrike we know how senior he was very senior commander very culpable for a lot of the events of 7th of october so an incredibly high value target um actually to strike dave you know there's

I would suggest a very high upwards limit of collateral damage that you're prepared to tolerate in that airstrike. But I can't put a number on it. That's down to the targeting pack that Israel put together before they pressed the button to fire those missiles. And here's the rub. None of us, not any one of us on this call, not anyone in the press, not anyone in the wider world can make any assessment of whether any Israeli airstrike has been proportionate or not.

unless they'd seen the targeting data that was processed before the IDF pulled the trigger. And that's been one of my really...

kind of observations through this war is that people are making claims about disproportionality based on the damage to Gaza, whereas that's actually legally irrelevant. And they're making claims that they cannot possibly know. So did the recent Air Wars report, for example, assumes that everyone is a civilian unless they can identify otherwise. But actually it doesn't matter. It's not an effect-based report.

legal system. It's an intent-based legal system. And unless you've had that intent walk through and explain to you, you can't possibly say whether it was legal or not.

Understood. So the human rights organizations that claim to be experts in international law, claiming that something must be disproportionate just because there is widespread damage, are ignoring, in fact, the way that proportionality is assessed within a military. And there are no objective standards, but there are expectations that militaries will take steps to mitigate harm to civilians. I remember when I was at the prime minister's office, the prime minister's

advisor Ophir Falk would speak of Israel setting a gold standard for civilian mitigation and I always felt a little bit uncomfortable with that term because there's nothing golden about war which is hell but from

Your visits inside Gaza with the IDF, your visits to Israeli intelligence, tell me what steps Israel has been taking, improvising, innovating, to mitigate harm to civilians. Tell me what you recognize from your own battlefield experience in Afghanistan. The key point

is the warnings. That's astonishing and I've never seen it done by another army. We certainly didn't do that in Afghanistan. We didn't, you know, drop millions of leaflets or send text messages and phone calls telling people to bug out from targets. Because actually that hugely militarily disadvantages you in some ways. Because if people are bugging out from the building, there's nothing to stop your target from bugging out as well. So that's unprecedented by the IDF.

I understand that roof knocking was used at the start of the war, which is where a device was dropped to make a small pop on top of a building to warn people that something much bigger was coming. I understand those aren't used quite as frequently anymore. But the really impressive civilian mitigation for me is the civilian harm mitigation cell. That is, no other army in the world has something like that. And it's the product of 10 years of research.

where they've used signals intelligence, mapping intelligence, human intelligence. They have Arabic speakers in there. They have people trawling social media to try and get that really clear idea of how many civilians are in the area before bombs are in the air. So sorry, what is the civilian harm mitigation cell? It's a bit of a mouthful. What is this system? So it sits in Beersheba. It's part of Southern Command. It's commanded by a brigadier.

And it has a whole bank of computers in there that breaks down Gaza into cells, geographical cells. And in each cell at any one moment in time, they can tell you how many civilians roughly are in that area compared to the normal baseline. And

Everyone in the IDF who's doing targeting has access to that. So when I spoke before about the targeting packs they put together, they absolutely have that data before they decide to launch a strike. And as I said, no other army in the world's got that. It's absolutely remarkable. I was very, very impressed. Andrew, before we finish, I want to get your take on the way that the media has been covering the

casualties in Gaza. When I was a spokesman, I had a feeling that much of the media would automatically believe anything Hamas said, automatically disbelieve anything Israel said. And you actually bring the receipts breaking down in a quantitative manner how Hamas statements are taken as fact. And the IDF statements about casualties are either not quoted at all or

all quoted with massive caveats, right? So the death toll is simply taken as gospel from Hamas. And then whatever the IDF says is always, but this cannot be verified. This cannot be whatever. What did you find?

So this is the work of our partner, Tanya Glazer and her team at 50 Global. Absolutely incredible. And this one, you know, I expected it to be bad, but I didn't expect it to be as bad as it is. So Tanya and her team looked at 1,378 articles between February and May this year. And what they found was quite astonishing.

So only 3% of the articles they looked at, 3% included the number of combatants when they cited the death statistics from Gaza. Only 16% of those articles mentioned that the health ministry's figures don't distinguish between combatants and civilians.

98% of articles were using those figures. 20% of them were citing those figures as if they were accepted facts from Hamas and didn't mention that they were the unverified Hamas Ministry of Health figures. And only...

5% of the analyzed articles cited the Israeli sources for fatality data and 3% gave that specific figure. And half of that citing of the IDF, half of that single figure percentage of citing IDF figures questioned them. So we're talking about 98% versus 3%.

is the extent to which Hamas have been platformed in this conflict versus IDF. The world's media has platformed one combatant in a conflict and the one they've chosen is the psychotic terror group and not the democratic nation states. It's absolutely appalling. Which is wild when you consider...

that the media is aware that Hamas has been lying to it, right? They know that Hamas put out a press release claiming 500 people were killed in an airstrike that flattened a hospital. There was no airstrike. No hospital was flattened. 500 people weren't killed. They continue to provide information from Hamas. In fact, the AP reported a while ago that the underlying data showed that the percentage of women killed

and children killed was well below what Hamas was counting, that the daily count was inconsistent with the overall trends and then seemed to ignore their own reporting. So I wonder, given that your focus in this report is not that the headline figure is wrong, but that they have inflated the number of

civilians allegedly killed in order to mischaracterize the war. Why do you think that the media keeps going along with this and how do you explain this bias that they will automatically believe anything Hamas says and disbelieve or not even quote what Israel says?

Yeah, that's a really difficult question. I mean, the BBC had my report put to them and they came back with a fairly petulant answer saying that Israel doesn't allow independent journalists. So I wonder how much of it is, I don't know, punitive? By the way, you can't have your cake and eat it because...

You know, if the journalists in Gaza are independent, then you have independent journalists in Gaza. If the journalists in Gaza are not independent and therefore you need independent journalists from outside, then draw your own conclusions about how reliable the information is that you're getting from them. But I digress. No, then that is a great point. And I'm stealing that for future. Please feel free to steal it without attribution. But do recommend Luthor nonetheless.

I shall do that. But the key thing is here, I think there's a degree of laziness. There's this preconception that Hamas has been reliable before and we've shown that they're not. And also there's 60 years of Palestinian information operations on the West. Hamas's campaign is designed to leverage that empathy that we have, emphasize the humanitarian disaster that they allege, emphasize the deaths of children and women

And I think that journalists get sucked into that just as much as anyone else, that we're all, you know, being a journalist doesn't give you a free pass on being psychologically vulnerable to being manipulated. And so I think we, you know, objectively Hamas's information campaign has been outstanding. They've dominated the battlefield and they've done it in really clever psychological ways. Yeah.

And you've done a very impressive job yourself. I have on my Twitter a list saved of what I call citizen sleuths. You and several other figures who've been doing the work that the media is supposed to be doing of actually going, investigating the numbers, the primary sources, bringing out that information that the media has not been doing. You're intensely invested in this effort.

But I wonder whether you think that this will move the needle and spark any introspection at all, because from my impression, it seems that the people who have an interest in your conclusion that Hamas has been inflating the civilian casualties have been tweeting about this obsessively. And the people who have an interest in covering that up because they're complicit with it, namely the media, are

have an interest in downplaying it because you're trying to hold them to account. So I'm particularly interested. I mean, obviously, Twitter is a cesspit and you've received horrible comments on Twitter and we don't need to delve into that. But behind the scenes, I mean, you're talking to people behind the scenes offline as well. What kind of reception have you been receiving? And does it leave you optimistic that there will be a lessons learned process within the media and within foreign governments as well?

Yeah, I think the big institutions have been relatively receptive. We've had invitations to submit op-eds to the Wall Street Journal, to Fox. BBC and Sky have ignored it, and I expected that in time. Well, there you go, Andrew. That comes back to the point that I was making, that Wall Street Journal and Fox are the more right-wing groups.

outlets that have been more sympathetic to it or criticize whatever coverage you want they have been more sympathetic and understanding of it or sky news and bbc haven't so is it the case that those who want to listen are listening and those who don't want to listen are putting their fingers in their ears

Yeah, I think so. But the reason I wrote this report was because I didn't expect to change the needle, you know, to move the needle on this. What I really wanted to do with the team, and I should give them a chuck up before we go, and that's Salo Eisenberg, Elliot Malin and Dr. Marks Lochin. What we wanted to achieve with this report was to give people a response because it's so relentless, you know, Hamas are reliable. These are the figures. There's 45,000 dead civilians.

And actually now if people have got my report in their hands, they can go and rebut that themselves. And so it might not be the international media argument, but it certainly gives the sort of the person on the street the ability to argue their case a bit more forcefully with something a bit more than just a thread they saw on Twitter or a fairly vague statement from the IDF.

Okay, Andrew, how can people continue to follow your work? Because not everything you write is as long as this report. You're also writing 280 characters on Twitter. How can people follow and continue the conversation?

Yeah, so on X, I'm Mr. Andrew Fox, although I am taking a break up from Tuesday of the new year, but please come and follow me anyway, and I'll be back in full force in January. Or I've got a sub stack, which is where you get my long pieces, and that's Mr. Andrew Fox dot sub stack dot com. Okay, Mr. Fox, Major Fox, as I prefer to call you. Thank you very much for joining us here on State of a Nation. I've been thoroughly educated. Thank you, Alon.

And that brings us to the end of today's episode of State of the Nation with Major Andrew Fox, the author of the new report, Questionable Counting, analyzing the death toll from the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza, published by the Henry Jackson Society. And the link to the report is in our podcast notes. You're invited to go over and scrutinize it yourself. As always, if you enjoy these episodes, find them educational, informative, please give us a like and subscribe on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts.

Share the link with a friend, a colleague you think will benefit from learning more than the headline of what the media is telling them and give us a glowing review. It really does help us get this platform out to a wider audience. For me in Tel Aviv, I'm Elon Levy and thanks for joining us.