The head of an anti-Hamas faction, Hussam Alastal, fires a weapon in the air as he is surrounded by masked gunmen, in an Israeli-held area in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, in this screenshot taken from a video released Nov. 21, 2025. Photo: Hussam Alastal/via REUTERS

Not long ago, a very intelligent friend asked me a sincere question.

He wanted to know whether, as a Zionist, I was disturbed by what he took to be a settled fact: that Israel had “killed 300 people in a tent while trying to get one terrorist.”

He wasn’t hostile. He wasn’t chanting slogans. He was genuinely troubled and trying to reconcile that number with my support for Israel.

What shocked me was not the question itself, but the assumption behind it. He works with numbers for a living, yet it had not occurred to him to ask the most basic question: “Is that figure actually true, and who produced it?” He had simply absorbed it as unquestionable reality.

When I explained that such numbers almost always trace back to Hamas-run institutions in Gaza, laundered through media outlets and NGOs that treat them as neutral sources, it was clearly a new way of looking at the war for him.

The conversation revealed something I see on a much larger scale: people who would never trust Hamas with their bank account are trusting it with their moral judgment.

When I describe Hamas’ listed death toll in Gaza, I describe it as the “casualty-number war.” It’s not just about how many people have died. It’s about who is doing the counting, what they are counting, and how those numbers are deployed to turn a complicated war into a morality play with ready-made villains and victims.

Hamas understands this perfectly. Its “Ministry of Health” in Gaza is not some independent public health office. It is part of a totalitarian structure that answers to the same regime that launched the October 7 massacre, embeds fighters and rocket launchers among civilians, and openly celebrates “martyrdom.”

Yet Western media outlets, NGOs, and politicians routinely preface their coverage with the same passive formulation: “According to the Gaza Health Ministry, more than X thousand people have been killed…”

Once that sentence is accepted as neutral, the argument is already half lost.

These headline numbers blur together every possible category of death: combatants and non-combatants, people killed by Hamas’ own rockets or internal violence, people who died of illness or old age, and people whose deaths are simply unverifiable.

There is rarely a breakdown by cause, location, or affiliation. The message is not “here is our best attempt at a complex casualty record.” The message is, “Israel killed this many people; now explain yourself.”

Western institutions, meanwhile, have powerful incentives to accept this framing. Journalists on deadline want a single, authoritative-sounding figure. NGOs need dramatic numbers to drive fundraising and campaigns. Politicians want an easy way to signal moral outrage without learning the underlying details. “According to Gaza’s Health Ministry…” gives them all exactly what they want.

The result is that Hamas’ tally becomes something close to sacred. To question it is treated as denial of suffering, rather than as basic due diligence.

To be clear, this does not mean that the real toll of the war is small, or that civilian deaths are imaginary. They are not. Wars in dense urban environments, against enemies who hide behind civilians, are always tragic. But tragedy does not excuse deception, and compassion does not require us to outsource moral judgment to a terrorist organization.

There is another trap we must avoid, however, and it lies on “our” side of the argument.

Recently, a claim circulated online that Hamas had “admitted” to losing 50,000 fighters and was preparing to pay stipends to their widows. It was an appealing narrative: if true, it would imply that the majority of Gaza’s war dead were Hamas’ own armed operatives, not civilians. Many people repeated it enthusiastically.

The problem is that the underlying evidence does not support such certainty. The 50,000 figure appears to come from extrapolations about an aid program for widows and vague statements in local media, not from a clear, formal admission of combatant deaths by Hamas itself. Israel’s own estimates of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters killed are much lower — on the order of tens of thousands, but not double that.

In other words, some of Hamas’ critics were tempted to do what they rightly accuse Hamas of doing: leaping from suggestive data to definitive, emotionally satisfying numbers.

That may feel good in the moment, but it ultimately weakens our case. If we want the world to take casualty manipulation seriously, we have to hold ourselves to a higher standard than Hamas does.

So how should we think and talk about Gaza casualty numbers?

First, always ask who is counting. A figure produced by a Hamas-run bureaucracy and laundered through sympathetic NGOs is not equivalent to an independent forensic assessment. That does not mean every number is automatically false; it means we must treat it as a political artifact, not a neutral statistic.

Second, ask what is being counted. Are natural deaths and pre-existing illnesses being folded into “war fatalities”? Are internal killings, executions of “collaborators,” gang violence, and misfired rockets landing in Gaza all being quietly attributed to Israel?

Are combatants and non-combatants being distinguished, or are they all being described as “civilians,” “women,” and “children”? If those questions are not being asked, the headline number is not serious.

Third, examine the incentives. Hamas gains strategically every time the West believes that almost every death in Gaza is an innocent civilian killed by the Israel Defense Forces. That perception fuels accusations of “genocide,” drives diplomatic pressure, and legitimizes further violence under the banner of “resistance.”

Conversely, Hamas has every incentive to hide its own fighters among civilians, both physically and statistically.

Fourth, be honest about uncertainty. We will probably never know the exact distribution of deaths in Gaza by category. That is the nature of war, especially in closed, authoritarian environments. But we can say, with confidence, that the picture is far more complex than the nightly news suggests.

We know that a significant share of the dead are combatants. We know that some deaths are caused by Hamas’ own actions, whether through misfires or internal violence. We know that some reported “war casualties” would have occurred from natural causes even in peacetime. A morally serious discourse must reflect that complexity.

For ordinary readers and viewers, the question becomes: what can I actually do when confronted with someone like my friend, who has been told that Israel “killed 300 people in a tent to get one terrorist” and accepted it as unquestionable fact?

A few simple moves can help:

• Slow the conversation down. Instead of arguing about whether 300 is “too many,” start with “Who gave you that number?” That alone often changes the entire frame.
• Separate grief from propaganda. It is possible to say, “Every innocent life lost is a tragedy,” while also saying, “That does not mean Hamas’ numbers are accurate, or that Israel is committing the crimes you’ve been told about.”
• Insist on categories, not just totals. Ask whether the figure distinguishes between terrorists and non-terrorists, between people killed by Hamas and those killed by Israel, between battlefield fatalities and natural deaths. Most numbers in circulation do not.
• Refuse to play by Hamas’ rules. Do not feel compelled to accept a Hamas-run institution’s tally as the starting point for every moral conversation. We are not obligated to let Israel’s enemies define the terms of debate, whether in language or in arithmetic.

My friend and I ended our conversation on good terms. He did not walk away with a perfect spreadsheet of Gaza casualties — neither of us has one. But he did walk away with a new question lodged in his mind: “Why am I letting Hamas tell me what to think?”

That, ultimately, is the goal. If we care about truth, about Israel’s legitimacy, and about the real human beings — Jews and Arabs alike — whose lives are at stake, we cannot allow a terrorist organization to be the world’s official statistician. We do not have to accept a calculator held in the same hands that fired the rockets and sent the “martyrs.”

We can insist on something better: honest categories, transparent methods, and a refusal to surrender our moral judgment to those who openly seek our destruction.

David E. Firester, Ph.D., is the Founder and CEO of TRAC Intelligence, LLC, and the author of Failure to Adapt: How Strategic Blindness Undermines Intelligence, Warfare, and Perception (2025).

Navy forces of the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution commandos and missile boats in Great Prophet IX Maneuver in the general area of Strait of Hormuz, Persian Gulf. Photo: Sayyed Shahab Odin Vajedi/Wikimedia Commons.

The theatricality of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) “Smart Control” maneuvers in the Strait of Hormuz this week is a calculated distraction from a far more consequential reality unfolding in the deep waters of the Indian Ocean.

While Tehran’s propaganda wing broadcasts images of high-speed boats and “intelligent” surveillance, the regime’s economic lifeblood is being systematically drained by an actor it once considered a reliable, if cautious, customer.

The confirmed seizure by India of three Iranian “shadow fleet” tankers — the Stellar Ruby, Asphalt Star, and Al Jafziyah — along with the dramatic boarding of the Veronica 3 by US forces, marks the operational debut of the Indo-Abrahamic Noose. These are not isolated incidents; they are the result of a coordinated maritime blockade designed to sever the IRGC’s economic lungs.

For years, the IRGC has operated on the assumption that the “Global South” — led by New Delhi — would remain a passive beneficiary of its illicit oil trade, providing a permanent escape valve from Western-led pressure. That assumption died this month. India’s transition from a neutral energy consumer to a proactive maritime enforcer signals a tectonic shift in the Indo-Pacific architecture.

By deploying 55 ships and 12 aircraft for round-the-clock surveillance, New Delhi has effectively shut down the “ship-to-ship” transfer networks used to mask the origin of Iranian crude. The seizure of the first three tankers, roughly 100 miles west of Mumbai, proved that the “shadow fleet” — the aging, uninsured vessels used to fund the “Axis of Resistance” — has lost its cloak of invisibility.

The IRGC’s “Smart Control” exercises, conducted amidst reports of a deep succession crisis in Tehran, are a desperate display of “atmospheric jihadism.” However, strategic reality is not dictated by camera-ready maneuvers in the shallows of the Gulf; it is dictated by the ability to move liquidity across oceans. When India acts as a maritime gatekeeper, it reinforces a fundamental truth: the “Iranian Threat” is no longer a sufficient deterrent against the national interests of rising powers.

What we are witnessing is the birth of the Indo-Abrahamic Alliance — a strategic pincer movement connecting India, Israel, the UAE, and the United States. This move follows a significant shift in Indo-American trade dynamics earlier this month. Washington is expected to slash tariffs on Indian goods from 50% to 18% this week. The economic incentive to align with a pro-Western security order has now been backed by kinetic maritime muscle.

This bloc — anchored by Israeli intelligence, Indian maritime muscle, and the strategic depth of pro-Western monarchies — is rendering the IRGC’s regional ambitions irrelevant. The meeting last week at the White House between President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu set the stage for this enforcement, with both leaders agreeing to target the 80% of Iranian oil flowing to China. India’s intervention ensures that this isolation is not just political, but material.

India’s move also counters the “Lawful Islamist” narrative favored by other regional players. While powers like Turkey attempt to position themselves as mediators while quietly enabling disruptive actors, India’s clear-eyed enforcement of maritime law exposes the futility of such hedging. New Delhi has realized that the India-Middle East-Europe Corridor (IMEC) cannot thrive in a sea patrolled by pirates and IRGC-funded proxies.

We are no longer debating whether normalization between Israel and the broader East is possible; we are observing its maturity into a permanent regional police force. This is the “Naturalization” of a pro-Western security order where the defense of trade routes is inseparable from the defeat of radical ideology.

As negotiations resume in Geneva this week, attended by high-level figures like Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, the Iranian delegation is finding its leverage non-existent. Tehran’s attempts to “bribe” Washington with economic concessions in aviation and mining ring hollow when their primary source of income is being impounded at sea.

The moral and strategic binary of the Middle East has never been clearer. On one side stands a desperate, murderous regime in Tehran conducting hollow drills in the Strait. On the other stands the Indo-Abrahamic Alliance, imposing a reality of law and order from the Mediterranean to the Indo-Pacific.

The IRGC cannot fund its proxies if its tankers cannot reach their destinations. By seizing these vessels throughout February, India and its partners have effectively recognized that peace is achieved only when the aggressor realizes their cause is terminal. The “shadow fleet” is being dismantled, the economic lungs of the regime are collapsing, and the Indo-Abrahamic Noose is anchored.

Amine Ayoub, a fellow at the Middle East Forum, is a policy analyst and writer based in Morocco. Follow him on X: @amineayoubx

An empty classroom. Photo: Wiki Commons.

When I sued Harvard for antisemitic discrimination, I thought the institutional hatred was confined to elite universities, places where free inquiry had given way to ideological straitjackets, rigorous scholarship to echo chambers, and protections for minorities to outright hostility toward Jews.

But what’s clear is that this hatred didn’t originate on college campuses. It’s been pushed in America’s K–12 schools for years — which is even more insidious because it molds the minds of every child in this country, not just those at elite universities, and it happens before students have the ability to think about and challenge ideas they are introduced to.

A new white paper from the North American Values Institute (NAVI), “When the Classroom Turns Hostile,” lays it out starkly: the same ideological machinery that corrupted higher ed has been hardwired into K–12 — from teacher training programs to curricula, unions, accreditation standards, state mandates, and shadowy activist networks that sidestep any real democratic accountability.

In colleges, students show up as adults with at least some defenses against indoctrination. But in elementary and high schools, kids are sponges, absorbing whatever framework they’re given to understand the world. That’s why this takeover isn’t just a Jewish problem;, it’s a national crisis, threatening the civic foundations of our country far more than any campus protest ever could.

The NAVI report exposes how post-Marxist, postcolonial, and critical theory dogmas — once fringe ideas in obscure grad seminars — have become a default operating system in K–12. They carve society into oppressors and the oppressed, paint America and the West as irredeemably evil, and brand Jews and Israel as symbols of “privilege” or “colonialism.”

This is systemic. Schools of education churn out teachers who see themselves as revolutionaries. Unions have ditched bread-and-butter issues like pay and job safety for full-throated social justice crusades. State agencies bake “equity” mandates into licensing and training that prioritize ideology over competence. Activist groups and foreign-funded outfits flood classrooms with biased materials, while online networks peddle unapproved lesson plans that turn schools into propaganda mills.

The end result? A toxic ecosystem that breeds hostility toward Jews and crushes anyone who dares to dissent.

Some well-meaning folks in the Jewish community think that the fix is more Holocaust lessons or Jewish history units. But as the NAVI report hammers home, that’s treating a symptom while ignoring the disease. When the system already labels Jews as oppressors and Israel as a settler state, piling on facts just gets reframed through that same biased lens. You can’t dismantle antisemitism when the curriculum rigs the game from the start.

The endgame at Harvard was clear, regardless of whether students arrived from public schools or elite private ones.

Antisemitism in K–12 isn’t some glitch — it’s the inevitable output of a politicized ideology that’s hijacked the system. As Jews, we’ve learned through countless generations that hatred aimed at us never stops there.

Classrooms in a democratic society are where future citizens learn to think critically, debate civilly, and thrive in a diverse democracy — or where they don’t. If we let those skills vanish in schools, don’t expect them to magically appear later.

This demands every ounce of communal strength, and here’s what we can do:

1. Legal firepower: File civil rights suits against any district fostering hostile environments for Jewish kids or flouting neutral laws. It takes real courage to drag powerful institutions into court, as I did with Harvard — facing down their armies of lawyers and endless resources. But that’s the kind of boldness we need to reclaim our rights.

2. Policy overhauls: Rewrite licensing, accreditation, curricula, and union rules to refocus on real learning, not activism.

3. Broad coalitions: This K-12 indoctrination hurts all families, not just ours. Forge alliances across ethnic and political lines, united by core American values. And if that means enduring smears of “switching teams” or betraying your side — remember, I used to campaign for Bernie Sanders. True courage means standing for what you believe in, no matter the backlash.

4. Grassroots push: Equip parents and their kids with the tools, guts, and backup to fight back — they’re our front-line warriors.

NAVI’s blueprint pinpoints where to strike and how to build a counter-ecosystem for real change. Every Jewish leader, donor, rabbi, federation, and advocate: Read it. Absorb it. Act on it.

When I took on Harvard, skeptics said it was a fool’s errand against an untouchable giant. But history proves that even the mightiest institutions crumble when everyday people declare, “Enough.” Our kids deserve schools rooted in tolerance, pluralism, excellence, and the freedoms that let Jews build lives here. Those aren’t partisan ideals — they’re American bedrock.

We can’t afford waves of college freshmen arriving on campus already marinated in Jew-hatred. The stakes are too high: America’s democracy and Jewish future hinge on reclaiming K–12. The time for half-measures is over. Let’s fight like our survival depends on it — because it does.

Shabbos Kestenbaum is a political commentator at PragerU and a former lead plaintiff in a civil rights lawsuit against Harvard University.