Last December, The Wall Street Journal contrasted the number of munitions dropped in the Gaza war with numbers from the US war in Iraq. In the roughly two months that had elapsed since the Oct. 7 massacre, Israel dropped 29,000 weapons in Gaza, the Journal explained, whereas the US military dropped just 3,678 munitions on Iraq from 2004 to 2010. The clear takeaway was that Israel was uniquely trigger-happy.

If history started in 2004, those statistics might faithfully tell the story. But the invasion of Iraq began — and ended — in 2003. That was the year Iraq’s cities fell to US forces, the year the regime was overthrown, and the year Saddam Hussein was captured.

If the Journal were interested in comparing what is comparable, readers would have learned that while Israel dropped 29,000 weapons in two months in 2023, the US in 2003 dropped that same number in half that time.

This example is one of many media manipulations, which have bent and stretched statistics from the Iraq war and others. And it has frequently been on the basis of such tampered evidence that the media has argued Israel’s fight against Hamas dramatically stands out compared to other wars throughout history.

To help make its case that the Gaza war “is different,” for example, The New York Times contrasted casualties over two months of fighting in Gaza to “the entire first year of the invasion of Iraq.”

In fact, the 2003 invasion lasted about one month, during which most of the Iraqi casualties mentioned by the newspaper were killed. (Never mind that in the Gaza war, the Times has also relied on undependable Hamas casualty breakdowns.)

If the Iraq comparison is important enough to cover, then it’s important enough to cover without downplaying the casualty rate in Iraq.

So let’s look at what The New York Times conceals. How different was Gaza than Iraq, really?

Over the 22 days from March 19, 2003, when invasion of Iraq began, and April 9, when the Saddam Hussein regime is understood to have collapsed, the US invasion led to the death of civilians at a higher rate than the best, albeit rough, estimates over that same time span in Gaza.

Our graph plots the number of Iraqi civilian deaths that have been verified by Iraq Body Count alongside estimates based on Hamas figures for total deaths in Gaza. (Hamas updates hide the number of combatants killed.)

We call our highest estimate of civilian casualties the “Hamas extrapolation,” since it takes Hamas’s overall numbers and assumes 80 percent of them are civilians, as a Hamas official cited by Reuters once charged.

Our lowest estimate, the “Israel extrapolation,” assumes 60 percent of Hamas’s stated casualties are civilians, in line with Israeli estimates (but ignoring a lower estimate used by Benjamin Netanyahu). The “Egypt extrapolation” in the middle assumes 70 percent of the deaths were civilians, in line with a projection by Egyptian intelligence officials who said the number falls between the belligerents’ estimates.

And what about the numbers after the first 22 days of fighting in Iraq and Gaza?

For the remainder of the year, the rate of deaths in Iraq fell to a trickle, as might be expected after the fall of the regime. In Gaza, fighting raged on, so the casualty totals quickly surpassed those in Iraq.

Still, the casualty rate in Gaza steadily declined, a fact that seems to have been lost in the media’s coverage of the fighting. The graph below, which also relies on Hamas’ casualty totals, shows how every month that has passed, the rate of casualties fell further below the rate during the invasion of Iraq.

This continuous decline in casualties as Hamas lost ground in Gaza is unsurprising, since Israel’s stated objective is to beat back Hamas and end its control over the territory.

Those who insist Israel’s intent is to destroy the Palestinian people — in other words, those throwing around the “genocide” slur — might have a harder time explaining the decline.

To note that the rates of munitions and casualties during the fight to unseat the Iraqi regime exceeded the rates in Gaza serves as a corrective to media misrepresentations. It doesn’t diminish the real suffering in Gaza, any more than a tallying of Hamas and Hezbollah rockets diminishes the hardship of thousands of Israeli families forced from their homes by those rockets, or the pain of Israelis whose children were murdered or kidnapped during Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre.

If war is hell, then urban war merits a worse description. In Gaza, we have an urban war in which Hamas terrorists dig themselves under the densely packed civilians they rule, a literal inversion of the humane arrangement.

If civilian casualties mean so little to Hamas, of course it refuses to surrender itself and its hostages. And in light of Hamas’s promises to repeat the Oct. 7 slaughter again and again, Israel’s obligation to its citizens is to do everything it reasonably can, politically and certainly militarily, to eliminate the threat.

To understand how the Gaza war is different, the press should start there — and stop manipulating the numbers.

Gilead Ini is a Senior Research Analyst at CAMERA, the foremost media watchdog organization focused on coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The post The Truth About Casualties: Comparing Gaza to the Iraq War first appeared on Algemeiner.com.