A new report, sourced to a European intelligence official, alleges that Hamas grossly overreported the death toll at the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza.
As RedState reported, at 7:20 PM (local) on Tuesday, Hamas officials began to release claims that Israel had struck the hospital, resulting in at least 200 deaths. Within an hour, the death toll had supposedly reached 500. There were immediate reasons to ask questions, though.
By the next morning, multiple videos, including live coverage by the pro-Hamas channel Al Jazeera, revealed that a barrage of rockets had been released in Gaza at 6:59 PM. One can be seen malfunctioning, reversing direction, exploding, and hitting the hospital. Further evidence that Israel was not at fault followed, with a cellphone intercept showing Palestinian Islamic Jihad members discussing where the rocket was fired from and where it landed.
Daylight footage of the hospital site provided an even clearer picture. Instead of a large crater, which would have been present had the explosion been an IAF bomb, only a small scuff in the ground existed with the rest of the damage likely being caused by burning fuel. Perhaps most importantly, despite claims of 500 people being dead, only the parking lot had been impacted, with the hospital itself (and the nearby chapel) being essentially undamaged.
With that said, before we knew any of that, there was reason to question the death count put out by Hamas. Here's what I wrote at the time.
For example, on its face, the reported death toll makes no sense. We are being asked to believe that in under an hour, Hamas was able to put out the fires, clear the rubble, and accurately count how many people died in the explosion. That is simply impossible, even as a close estimate.
The best governments in the world would take a week to figure out a preliminary number of dead in a situation like this, yet the claimed death toll went from 200 initially to 500 within a few minutes, and within an hour, Hamas was claiming 900 dead.
Now, according to a European intelligence official, who spoke to Le Point (a French news outlet), the actual death toll was somewhere between 10 and 50.
Keep in mind that Israel is still counting the dead from an attack that occurred nearly two weeks ago. Why? Because it takes time to recover bodies, identify them, and accurately count them. It was simply improbable that "Palestinian Health Authorities," otherwise known as Hamas, had garnered an accurate death toll within an hour. There were actually videos of the fire in the parking lot still burning while Hamas was claiming to know exactly how many died.
In the aftermath, Hamas "corrected" its count to 471, but there's no reason to think that number is accurate either. The parking lot at the hospital is relatively small, and even if you had people standing shoulder to shoulder, that kind of death toll would make no sense. In reality, all the people in the vicinity were camping out on a grass area closer to the hospital's main building. Deaths occurred, but there is far more reason to believe this latest report of 10-50 deaths than 471.
Despite that, world press outlets are continuing to repeat Hamas death tolls as authoritative. Here was NBC News two days after the explosion.
It's astonishing. We have ample evidence that "Palestinian health officials" continue to grossly inflate death tolls for propaganda reasons, and these press outlets continue to cite them without a second thought. Why would anyone trust them in the future?