One day after the publication of yet another detailed study identifying serious flaws and anomalies in Hamas-supplied figures for fatalities incurred in Israel’s Gaza Strip offensive, the Associated Press ran a headline and article which cited the terror organization’s disputed and highly questionable figures as fact without even providing attribution.
The Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists urges: “Identify sources clearly. The public is entitled to as much information as possible to judge the reliability and motivations of sources.” But AP did the exact opposite, publishing a headline which concealed the source of an unreliable casualty figure supplied by a designated terror organization and falsely presented the contested number as confirmed fact: “Israel will close its Ireland embassy as Palestinian death toll nears 45,000.”
In the seventh paragraph of their Dec. 15 article, reporters Wafaa Shurafa and Natalie Melzer likewise cast unverified Hamas data as actual truth: “Israeli forces continued Sunday to pound Gaza, including the largely isolated north, as the Palestinian death toll in the war approached 45,000.”
Only some one dozen paragraphs later does the article provide attribution:
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed almost 45,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. The ministry’s count does not distinguish between combatants and civilians, but it says over half of the dead have been women and children.
But most readers won’t get that far. They’ve already been fed the figure in the headline as if it’s a verified fact, as opposed to an unsubstantiated number supplied by a terror organization.
Not only is Hamas’ casualty data unverified; it’s also highly disputed and rife with anomalies. The latest in a string of studies to identify multiple flaws and discrepancies in Hamas’ data is Andrew Fox’s Henry Jackson Society in-depth study, published Dec. 14. These anomalies include listing people who died from natural causes as war victims, counting those killed by errant Palestinian rockets or Hamas gunmen as victims of Israeli airstrikes, inflating the number of children killed by misreporting ages, miscategorizing men as women with the same result, and so on (“Questionable Counting: Analysing the Death Toll From the Hamas-Run Ministry of Health in Gaza“).
Furthermore, while Shurafa and Melzer treated Hamas’ figure as credible, and even factual, they completely ignored Israeli-supplied information on fatalities in the Gaza Strip. Notably, AP does at times cite, including in a separate Dec. 16 article, the Israeli military’s information that fatalities include more than 17,000 Hamas combatants. But this information is always cited with a caveat qualifying Israeli credibility: “The Israeli military says it has killed more than 17,000 militants, without providing evidence.” (Emphasis added.)
It’s striking that the AP does not likewise call Hamas’ credibility into question despite the numerous well documented and serious anomalies in Hamas’ figures and the fact that thousands among the reported 45,000 are unidentified, even according to Hamas’ acknowledgment.
“More than half the world’s population sees AP journalism every day,” the leading wire service maintains. While boasting it has “done more than any organization in the world to expand the reach of factual reporting,” AP excels at expanding the reach of Hamas propaganda dressed up as factual reporting.