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Hamas’ Gaza Casualties Can’t Be Trusted; Biden Was Right the First Time
News outlets have reported nearly 16,000 deaths in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, as Israel attempts to remove the group that slaughtered 1,200 Israelis on October 7, and many innocent Jews in the preceding years.
But Gaza casualty figures come from the Hamas-run health ministry.
Hamas’ full name is the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement. Its founding charter calls for the destruction of Israel, and a genocide of Jews. By 1995 the United States had designated Hamas — funded, armed, and trained by Iran — a terrorist organization.
The group’s casualty figures, usually said to comprise “mostly women and children” are used to destroy support for Israel on the world stage, and put pressure on President Joe Biden to let Hamas survive. The demand that Israel stop or reduce its campaign – dressed as concern over “indiscriminate” Israeli attacks, comes from administration staffers, congressional Democrats and America’s post-liberal, anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish left.
So, the Biden administration, which botched the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, and failed to discourage Vladimir Putin before he launched Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, now attempts to direct and manage Israel’s war against Hamas.
There are good reasons to doubt statistics from the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry (more on that below). But assume momentarily the casualty count is correct. Do likewise with Israel’s late November estimate that it had killed up to 4,000 terrorists. That leaves approximately 11,000 noncombatant Palestinian Arab fatalities.
Four thousand dead gunmen to 11,000 noncombatant fatalities is a proportion of 2.63 to 1. In 2015, the United Nations put combatant-to-noncombatant deaths caused by US and British forces in Afghanistan and Iraq at between 3:1 and 4:1.
And that’s assuming Hamas’ numbers can be trusted. But they can’t be.
After the 50-day Israel-Hamas 2014 war in the Gaza Strip, Gen. Martin Dempsey, then chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, noted that Israel had gone out of its way to minimize non-combatant casualties, including by warning civilians of pending attacks in their neighborhoods.
The IDF has done the same in current fighting, dropping leaflets, making phone calls by Arabic-speaking IDF soldiers, and otherwise urging civilians to flee from Hamas targets. As Daniel Pomerantz pointed out, Israel even fired against Hamas soldiers to protect Palestinian civilians.
Numbers can lie
According to Lenny Ben-David, of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Hamas’ current figures are essentially “fanciful propaganda statistics.” That’s because after the 2014 war, which Hamas provoked by kidnapping and murdering three Israelis, its health ministry stopped specifying fatalities by age and sex.
Now Hamas lumps all Gazan deaths since October 7 together. This includes all Hamas terrorists; the approximately 750 who died of natural causes through November 30, per CIA calculations; the hundreds supposedly killed by strikes at the al-Ahli Hospital (by the errant Palestinian Islamic Jihad missile) in the Jabalya refugee district (more likely 40 to 50 combined as suggested by photographs); and an unknown number of “collaborators” killed by Hamas or its junior partner, the Iranian-supported PIJ.
In another analysis for the Jerusalem Center, “Hamas’ Numbers Warfare,” Prof. Kobi Michael, a senior researcher at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, asked how it was that after the first five weeks of fighting, “neither the Hamas leadership nor the Palestinian Ministry of Health reported a single casualty among Hamas forces.” Further, “no one questioned how PMH reported 30,000 Palestinians wounded when the total number of hospital beds in all medical facilities in Gaza, including UNRWA [United Nations Relief and Works Agency] clinics, did not exceed 3,000. So, where exactly are all the 30,000 wounded?”
Michael estimated dead and wounded Gazans at 50 percent of the total announced by Hamas-controlled officials, and “at least half of the number of dead and wounded are probably Hamas members..”
Next, former US intelligence analyst Malcolm Nance has noted:
16,000 dead? HOW DO YOU KNOW THESE KILLED FIGURES ARE TRUE?
The number of Palestinians casualties reported are almost IMPOSSIBLE TO BELIEVE.
Yes, the number of KIA/WIA may ultimately be grievous but I predict these 1,000 KIA per day numbers are simply JUST MADE UP by HAMAS. WHO IS COUNTING DEAD & WOUNDED & MISSING?
We’ve seen one mass grave of 110 adults. Until the ceasefire there was no integrated medical reporting system or even Wi-Fi, right? How did Doctors collect & pass info on verified dead? Did they use couriers with notebooks? Signal flags? Carrier pigeons?
Outside of hospital tallies (& those directors have lied repeatedly about casualties) how do they know how many actually died outside of in their care? Where are they buried? Were HAMAS terrorist KIA numbers were included? Who is collecting & documenting the corpses in the streets. Where are they all buried? Are there over 160 mass graves (w/100 bodies) the world has somehow not seen?
Also how DID HAMAS KNOW all the exact names, ID numbers & family members on the list of 6,700 dead a week ago? Sorry. I don’t believe it. I worked Satellite imagery analysis on the Srebrenica massacre of 6,000 KIA & seen countable graves at ISIS’s & Mariupol’s mass grave sites. You can make a raw estimate from the mass graves. BUT WHERE ARE THEY IN GAZA?
Don’t tell me all victims are all buried under buildings. Then it’s just as possible the building was empty. Sorry It is just Impossible to verify ANY HAMAS health ministry death tolls. The media, NGOs & UN uses HAMAS figures.
President Joe Biden blundered in late October by confessing he was “disappointed in myself” for publicly doubting Hamas-issued Palestinian casualty counts. Biden made his initial, more pertinent public statement on the numbers on October 25, saying, “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed.” He added that “I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s a price of waging war.”
Blame not a game
Only a day later, American Muslim representatives were in the White House, urging the president to show more empathy for Hamas’ human shield/human sacrifice victims. That is, to pressure Israel to back off.
Shortly before the American Civil War, William T. Sherman, later Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s right-hand man as a general himself, served as superintendent of the Louisiana Seminary of Learning and Military Academy (now Louisiana State University). He thought Southern enthusiasm for secession was mad. He is said to have warned that secession would lead to war and war to massive death and destruction. It did, including his famous “march to the sea” that destroyed much of Georgia and South Carolina.
What does that have to do with Hamas and Israel? After October 7 and the IDF’s counter-attack, Hamas pledged to attempt more genocidal raids into Israel until the Jewish state and its Jews are destroyed. Israeli officials believe the organization started the war with approximately 30,000 gunmen. To eliminate future threats from Gaza and reestablish deterrence against the larger Iranian-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon, the IDF will have to kill thousands more Hamas members. Given the choice the terrorists made to fight among Gaza’s civilians, that means many more noncombatant deaths.
Israel’s enemies invert the distinction between those sworn to murder Jews and Jews committed to defend themselves. Their progressive jargon fails to hide an antisemitic reaction that is both neo-Marxist and neo-Nazi. The White House must reassert that responsibility for noncombatant deaths in the Gaza Strip belongs to the Jew haters, not the Jewish state.
Eric Rozenman is communications consultant for the Jewish Policy Center and author, most recently, of From Elvis to Trump, Eyewitness to the Unraveling: Co-Starring Richard Nixon, Andy Warhol, Bill Clinton, the Supremes and Barack Obama! Opinions expressed above are solely his own.
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Pro-Hamas Campus Groups Call for Toppling US Government, Killing Soldiers

A pro-Hamas demonstrator uses a megaphone at Columbia University, on the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict, in New York City, US, Oct. 7, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Mike Segar
The National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP) organization condemned the US bombing of nuclear facilities in the Islamic Republic of Iran over the weekend, threatening that the American government will be deposed.
The anti-government comments came one day after US President Donald Trump ordered the bombing of three key Iranian nuclear sites — Fordow, Isfahan, and Natanz — where Western governments believe the Islamist regime was working to build nuclear weapons. Tehran has claimed its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes
“The empire will fall, from Gaza to Tehran,” NSJP said, writing on the Instagram social media platform. “The unprovoked attacks the US and the Zionist entity have launched against Iran prove only one thing: imperialism in the region will not stop at suffocating Palestine. From Iraq to Lebanon, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and now Iran, the Empire [sic] demands constant expansion and destabilization.”
It added, “We must be clear: Nuclear development is neither a crime nor the reason for the US’ war against Iran. The US Empire cannot permit the continued existence of a country that dares to stand against Zionism and imperialism.”
On Monday, Asaf Romirowsky, a Middle East expert and the executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME), said that NSJP is mirroring an ideology that university professors have trafficked and taught to their students since the 1960s.
“Left-wing academics have loathed ‘American imperialism’ since the Vietnam War and used it to explain and more importantly justify violent ‘’iberation movements’ around the world. Both communist and Muslim revolutions and insurgencies have been applauded over the years by American academics and their European counterparts,” Romirowsky said. “Some of that has been transmitted to students disinterested in the details of Islamic theology (which underlie Iranian policy). Anti-imperialism situates the Palestinian cause firmly on the political left and glosses over its theological basis in Sunni theology — which is perfectly well expressed in the Hamas Charter and countless other Hamas statements.”
SJP splinter groups across higher education rallied to share NSJP’s post, as noted by the antisemitism watchdog group AMCHA Initiative on Monday. Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) chapters at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Florida reposted it to their Instagram stories, while an SJP group for graduate students of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) did so as well. At Columbia University, a group which calls itself “Unity Fields” posted a photograph of the coffins of fallen US soldiers, captioning it, “Soon, Inshallah,” which means “God willing” in Arabic.
Within Our Lifetime (WOL), another pro-Hamas group which directs campus activities, said, “From Iran to Palestine, from Lebanon to Syria to Yemen, it is our duty from within the belly of the beast to stand against the US empire and zionist [sic] entity’s barbaric, illegal genocidal aggression, and to stand by all those resisting the ongoing genocide in Gaza by any means necessary.”
The tight coordination of the group’s messaging demands a complete accounting of NSJP’s funding, according to Alex Joffe, a historian and editor of the BDS Monitor for SPME.
“The relationship between NSJP and other action-oriented groups, such as Within Our Lifetime and the Party for Socialism and Liberation, suggest nearly complete overlap in interests and even personnel. Most problematic are the relationships between these Muslim and communist vanguard groups and the nominally legitimate Democratic Socialists of America and Working Families Party,” he explained. “These overlaps and penetrations into broader politics leaves outstanding the question of who is directing whom. The instant pivoting of Communist Chinese Party-backed groups like Code Pink to support Iran points to the fact that they, like NSJP, are not grassroots movements but primarily tools for state actors, above all Qatar, China, Iran, Russia and North Korea.”
He continued, “The question of who funds NSJP is therefore more important than ever. With NSJP and other organizations threatening and engaging in domestic violence, the national security threats have increased and should be addressed by local and federal authorities.”
As The Algemeiner has previously reported, National Students for Justice in Palestine, which has been linked to Islamist terrorist organizations, has publicly discussed its strategy of using the anti-Zionist student movement as a weapon for destroying the US.
“Divestment [from Israel] is not an incrementalist goal. True divestment necessitates nothing short of the total collapse of the university structure and American empire itself,” the organization said in September 2024. “It is not possible for imperial spoils to remain so heavily concentrated in the metropole and its high-cultural repositories without the continuous suppression of populations that resist the empire’s expansion; to divest from this is to undermine and eradicate America as we know it.”
The tweet was the latest in a series of revelations of SJP’s revolutionary goals and its apparent plans to amass armies of students and young people for a long campaign of subversion against US institutions, including the economy, military, and higher education. Like past anti-American movements, SJP has also been fixated on the presence and prominence of Jews in American life and the US’s alliance with Israel, the world’s only Jewish state.
On the same day the tweet was posted, Columbia University’s most strident pro-Hamas organization was reported to be distributing literature calling on students to join the Palestinian terrorist group’s movement to destroy Israel during the school’s convocation ceremony.
“This booklet is part of a coordinated and intentional effort to uphold the principles of the thawabit and the Palestinian resistance movement overall by transmitting the words of the resistance directly,” said a pamphlet distributed by Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), a Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) spinoff, to incoming freshmen. “This material aims to build popular support for the Palestinian war of national liberation, a war which is waged through armed struggle.”
Other sections of the pamphlet were explicitly Islamist, invoking the name of “Allah, the most gracious” and referring to Hamas as the “Islamic Resistance Movement.” Proclaiming, “Glory to Gaza that gave hope to the oppressed, that humiliated the ‘invincible’ Zionist army,” it said its purpose is to build an army of Muslims worldwide.
“We call upon the masses of our Arab and Islamic nations, its scholars, men, institutions, and active forces to come out in roaring crowds tomorrow,” it added, referring to an event which took place the previous December. “We also renew our invitation to the free people and those with living consciences around the world to continue and escalate their global public movement, rejecting the occupation’s crimes, in solidarity with our people and their just cause and legitimate struggle.”
Middle East experts have long suspected that foreign agents are conspiring with SJP chapters — and its spinoffs — in the US to convulse college campuses and lobby for the disintegration of the US-Israel relationship, an outcome that would benefit Middle Eastern powers such as Iran, whose leaders regularly call for the destruction of both the US and Israel.
In July 2024, then-US National Intelligence Director Avril Haines issued a statement outlining how Iran has encouraged and provided financial support to the anti-Israel campus protest movement and explaining that it is part of a larger plan to “undermine confidence in our democratic institutions.” Haines also confirmed that US intelligence agencies have “observed actors tied to Iran’s government posing as activists online, seeking to encourage protests, and even providing financial support to protesters.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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UK to Ban Group Palestine Action Under Anti-Terrorism Laws

Police officers block a street as pro-Palestinian demonstrators gather in protest against Britain’s Home Secretary Yvette Cooper’s plans to proscribe the “Palestine Action” group in the coming weeks, in London, Britain, June 23, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Jaimi Joy
Britain said on Monday it would use anti-terrorism laws to ban the organization Palestine Action, making it a criminal offence to belong to the group after its activists damaged two UK military planes in protest at London’s support for Israel.
The proscription would put the pro-Palestinian group on a par with Hamas, al-Qaeda, or ISIS under British law, making it illegal for anyone to promote it or be a member. Those who breached the ban could face up to 14 years in jail.
Palestine Action has regularly targeted British sites connected to Israeli defense firm Elbit Systems as well as other companies in Britain linked to Israel since the start of the conflict in Gaza in 2023.
In its latest and most high-profile action, two of its members entered a Royal Air Force base in central England on Friday, spraying paint into the engines of the Voyager transport aircraft and further damaging them with crowbars.
“The disgraceful attack on Brize Norton … is the latest in a long history of unacceptable criminal damage committed by Palestine Action,” Home Secretary [interior minister] Yvette Cooper said in a written statement to parliament.
“The UK’s defense enterprise is vital to the nation’s national security and this government will not tolerate those that put that security at risk.”
She said the group‘s actions had become more aggressive and caused millions of pounds of damage.
Under British law, the Home Secretary can proscribe a group if it is believed it commits, encourages, or “is otherwise concerned in terrorism.” The banning order will be laid before parliament on June 30 and will come into effect if approved.
Palestine Action, which says Britain is an “active participant” in the conflict in Gaza because of military support it provides to Israel, called the ban “an unhinged reaction” which it would challenge, and accused Cooper of making a series of “categorically false claims.”
“The real crime here is not red paint being sprayed on these war planes,” it said in a statement.
Earlier on Monday, the group was forced to change the location of a planned protest after police banned it from staging a demonstration outside parliament, otherwise a popular location for protests in support of a range of causes.
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MAGA Commentators Clash Over Trump’s Choice to Bomb Iran

Tucker Carlson speaks on July 18, 2024, during the final day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Photo: Jasper Colt-USA TODAY via Reuters Connect
US President Donald Trump’s decision to bomb three of Iran’s key nuclear facilities over the weekend has divided his longtime supporters, with some prominent voices in the so-called Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement opposing the strikes and others standing with the administration’s military action.
Mark Levin, the longtime conservative talk radio host and vocal pro-Israel voice, called out US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) for her disagreement with the US strikes, known as Operation Midnight Hammer.
On Sunday, Greene wrote on X, “I don’t know anyone in America who has been the victim of a crime or killed by Iran, but I know many people who have been victims of crime committed by criminal illegal aliens or MURDERED by Cartel and Chinese fentanyl/drugs.” She warned that “Neocon warmongers beat their drums of war and act like Billy badasses going to war in countries most Americans have never seen and can’t find on a map, but never find the courage to go to war against the actual terrorists who actually do kill Americans, invade our land, and make BILLIONS doing it day after day, year after year.”
In response, Levin labeled Greene a “shameless nitwit” and asked, “How incredibly dumb is this Marjorie Taylor Green? She doesn’t know anyone in America who has been a victim of crime or killed by Iran? You mean the thousands of Americans, especially military personnel, killed and maimed by the Iranian terrorist regime?”
Levin aimed his ire at other leaders on both left and right who he christened “America’s Iranian nukes coalition.” He wrote that “if the radical Democrats and their Isolationist fake MAGA reprobates had their way, Iran would have nuclear weapons. This is the new gravely dangerous coalition of Marxists-Islamists-isolationists-grifters. They’re represented by the likes of Bernie Sanders- AOC-Schumer-Jeffries and Rand Paul-Massie-MTG- Qatarlson-Bannon. And they’re giving aid and comfort to a regime that has murdered directly and indirectly thousands of Americans. Never forget. They will forever be opposed and challenged by we, the people — America First loving patriots.”
Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host-turned-podcaster, has faced recent accusations promoted by social media influencer Laura Loomer, alleging links to Qatar, claims which he denies, thus prompting Levin’s “Qatarlson” epithet. Carlson had clashed over Iran in a recent interview with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), reportedly watched by Trump.
Steve Bannon, the former Breitbart News CEO-turned-presidential adviser-turned America First podcaster, declared his disagreement with Trump’s invocation of America’s potential engagement toward regime change in a Truth Social post on Sunday.
“Is this because the ultimate goal is regime change?” Bannon asked. “And if that’s fine, Israelis, have at it. If you want regime change, go for it, baby. Just no participation by the United States government.”
The Daily Beast reported that according to anti-Trump biographer Michael Wolff, unnamed sources within the administration described how Trump had initially leaned toward the Carlson-Bannon isolationist position until shifting Friday under congressional Republicans’ influence toward seeing the value to his image of a successful strike. “The tenor of the phone calls was him saying, ‘I think I’m gonna look very good if I do this,’” Wolff said.
Further exposing the extent to which the Iran strikes have diverged from the last decade of the MAGA movement’s tilt toward isolationism, two of Trump’s former close allies who later parted ways with him and went on to criticize his actions have now voiced their support.
Former Vice President Mike Pence and former National Security Adviser John Bolton have both historically identified with former President Ronald Reagan’s “peace through strength” hawkish foreign policy philosophy. Each praised the bombings of Iran’s nuclear sites.
Pence said to Fox News on Sunday that even though “the president and I have had our differences,” he “couldn’t be more proud [sic] of President Trump’s decisive leadership in this moment or the extraordinary professionalism and courage of our armed forces that brought about this historic mission.”
On Sunday morning, the conservative magazine Washington Examiner published an article with the headline “Trump did the right thing in Iran” by Bolton, one of the conservative movement’s most steadfast and robust Iran hawks.
“It was long past time that Washington did more to aid Israel in defeating Iran and took direct action against Tehran’s nuclear proliferation efforts,” Bolton wrote. “There are undoubtedly additional measures now underway to protect American deployed forces and civilian personnel in the region against Iranian retaliation now that we have taken offensive military action. Similarly, we should continue bringing forward additional forces to bolster Israeli and Gulf Arab state defenses against Tehran military retaliation.”
Bolton warned that “peace and security in the Middle East are impossible while the ayatollahs rule in Tehran.” He urged that “overthrowing the current regime is a necessary, even if not a sufficient, condition to reach that goal. The sooner the better.”
Trump said after Saturday night’s strikes that the US was acting to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons but not seeking regime change. The next day, however, he seemed to entertain the idea. Writing on Truth Social, he posted: “It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change,’ but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!”
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