April 12, 2024: How Many Dead in Gaza?

Iran and America; Argentine court rules on AMIA bombing; Claim the Verso loft for Dar al-Islam!

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The Big Story

The Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health (MOH) announced on April 6 that it has “incomplete” data for 11,371 of the 33,091 Palestinian casualties it claims to have counted in Gaza—three days after it said it had incomplete data for 12,263 records. Does this mean that the true fatality number in Gaza is something closer to 22,000 than 33,000? Not exactly. What it does mean is that the 33,000 figure is completely unreliable—which we already knew. 

The MOH’s admission of the “incomplete” data appears to be a response to increased media scrutiny of its casualty figures. Gabriel Epstein of The Washington Institute explained the basic problem with these numbers in a March 26 report. Until mid-December at the latest, the MOH produced the majority of its casualty estimates through its “central collection system,” which records deaths counted in hospitals and morgues and by organizations such as the Palestinian Red Crescent Society. As Wharton statistics professor Abraham Wyner explained in Tablet on March 6, when examining these statistics from Oct. 26 to Nov. 10—the only days the MOH put out daily casualty counts plus totals for women and children—even these numbers show strong statistical evidence of manipulation. But even if we assume for the sake of argument that these numbers have a loose relation to reality, they only account for around 19,000 of the claimed casualties in Gaza. 

Beginning with Israel’s ground invasion in early November, however, the MOH began shifting from the central collection system toward what it termed “reliable media reports,” which until April 1 allegedly accounted for around 15,000 of the reported casualties in Gaza and now account for the 11,000-12,000 currently reported as “incomplete.” The MOH, however, offers no explanation as to its methodology for these figures, and it doesn’t take a genius to understand that media reports in Hamas-controlled Gaza are anything but reliable. Indeed, for a sense of their reliability, simply observe the X feed of Ramy Abdu of the NGO Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, who constantly cites ludicrous on-the ground “media reports” that the IDF has executed dozens of Gazan children, harvested organs from exhumed Palestinian bodies, or forced hundreds of “civilian” detainees to dig a mass grave before lining them up and shooting them. 

But don’t believe us—the problem is in the numbers themselves. As Epstein explained, 91.6% of the casualties in the Gazan “media reports” were women and children, which is absurd on its face: 

It appears that through the end of March, the MOH was simply using the media reports as a slush pile to obscure Hamas’ battlefield losses, make the reported deaths fit with its claim that 72% of those killed were women and children, and ensure that the overall death toll never dropped, even as duplicate reports and other errors were pruned from the more “reliable” elements of the counting system. 

By April, however, some in the media were beginning to press the MOH about its methodology. As Epstein told us over the phone, on April 1, following the release of a Sky News report calling the media reports numbers into question, the MOH dropped all references to “media reports” in its daily updates and instead began referring to these entries as having “incomplete data.” It also introduced a new category—online reports from family members of the deceased—which dropped the number of “incomplete” from 15,000 to the 11,000-12,000 figure it claims today. On the same day, the MOH also stopped claiming that 72% of the dead were women and children, which it dismissed as a “media estimate.” It now claims only that a “majority” of the dead are women and children, although the Gazan Government Media Office continues to repeat the fake 72% figure—as does the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. 

The MOH also published, on March 29 and March 31, lists of “confirmed” fatalities, which combined the central collection fatalities with family reports. These, too, appear to be at least partly fake. The lists include names, birth dates, and ID numbers, but as both Epstein and Mark Zlochin have noted, working from the two different reports, roughly 3,500 of these fatalities include missing IDs, duplicate IDs, or invalid ID numbers. So not only are the incomplete numbers incomplete, the complete numbers are incomplete, too. 

The upshot, Epstein concludes, is that the “available data does not allow for reliable estimates” about either the total number of deaths or the combatant-civilian ratio—although the latter is almost certainly understated by the MOH data. The bottom line is that we don’t know the real numbers, but no one else does either—which is something to keep in mind next time you hear about the “30,000 dead in Gaza, mostly women and children.” 

IN THE BACK PAGES: How Joe Lieberman intervened in support of a Sunday-observing Presbyterian

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The Rest

→Over the past 48 hours, we’ve been inundated with a series of contradictory reports and warnings about Iran’s allegedly imminent retaliation against Israel for the assassination of several Iranian commanders in Syria earlier this month. For instance, CBS reported Friday that U.S. officials expected a “major Iranian attack” against Israel, possibly involving “more than 100 drones and dozens of missiles,” and that they believe it “would be challenging for Israelis to defend against an attack of such magnitude.” Scary! Meanwhile, Barak Ravid reported in Axios on Friday that U.S. and Iranian officials have been in quiet contact, with the Americans telling the Iranians that they had no involvement in the Syria strike and the Iranians communicating that “we will attack the forces that attack us, so don’t fuck with us and we won’t fuck with you,” according to a U.S. official quoted in the piece. That’s at the same time, of course, that the United States is publicly declaring its iron-clad commitment to defending Israel against Iran. Ravid also reported that the White House has demanded to “have a say before decisions are made about any retaliation by Israel,” while a U.S. official told Saudi Arabia’s Al Arabiya that “the United States will take part in the response to the Iranian response if Tehran escalates the situation inappropriately.”

Can someone make this make sense? Luckily, we have Tablet’s Tony Badran. Here’s Tony:

The whole dynamic is gross and people are missing the reality it describes—because Obama has already normalized it. 

In one of those interviews Obama did with Jeffrey Goldberg, he laid out very specifically how the United States would “manage” the “lesser” “misbehavior” of the Iranians short of nuclear arms—i.e., we would become the arbiters between everyone and the Iranians, who become our principal interlocutors in the region. The Obama-Biden team then fleshed out that policy with “regional integration,” which gave it a territorial definition and more explicitly defined Israel’s position and in fact its very nature. The 2022 maritime deal with Lebanon was the official expression of it: The United States stands between Israel and Hezbollah as an arbiter/interlocutor and protector of Iranian equities. Now you’re seeing more and more facets of that arrangement, as the Iranians make their determinations based on the U.S. posture. 

Now the United States gets to determine what “Iranian response” is “appropriate” and “proportional,” because the premise of an “Iranian response” is a given. So under the false pretense of the United States maintaining “evenhandedness” and “equidistance” between Israel and Iran, the reality is that the United States becomes the messenger boy/bagman/lawyer of the Iranians, otherwise it’s Israel that’s putting American soldiers/interests/stability in jeopardy. 

→Iran, acting through Hezbollah, “organized, planned, financed, and executed” the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Argentina (which killed 29 and wounded 242) and the 1994 bombing of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina, aka the AMIA (which killed 85 and wounded more than 300), both in Buenos Aires, according to a Thursday ruling by an Argentine federal court. Argentina’s Federal Criminal Court of Cassation ruled that Iran and Hezbollah are guilty of “crimes against humanity” for the attacks and said that “high-level Iranian officials and members of the diplomatic mission in Iran” were involved in ordering them, per a write-up of the ruling in The Jerusalem Post. 

While the basic outline of this story is well-known, successive Argentine governments have attempted to cover it up. The bombings had previously been “investigated” by the governments of socialist presidents Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner—the latter via a “truth commission” with Iran, which Fernández de Kirchner was diplomatically courting at the time. That investigation “exonerated” Iran, with Kirchner going so far as to accuse Israel of bombing its own embassy in a false flag attack. Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman, who confirmed Iran’s responsibility and accused the Fernández de Kirchner government of covering it up, was found dead of a single gunshot wound to the head shortly after going public with his findings, in what authorities initially tried to pass off as a “suicide.”

Reached by email, Matthew Levitt of The Washington Institute told The Scroll: 

This week’s ruling tells us nothing new about Iran and Hezbollah’s long-established roles in the 1994 AMIA and 1992 Israeli embassy bombings, but they vindicate the work of the late Argentine prosecutor, Alberto Nisman, who was murdered in 2015 the night before he was scheduled to testify before the Argentinean parliament to present new evidence about the Kirchner government’s cover-up of the attack and Iran and Hezbollah’s role in it.  

The initial Argentinian investigation into the bombing was marred by corruption from the outset. Judge Juan Jose Galiano, who led the initial investigation for about a decade, was ultimately convicted and jailed for his role in a cover-up that included concealing evidence and bribing police to lie in the case. It took until 2003 for the Government of Argentina to issue arrest warrants for both Imad Mughniyeh and Assad Barakat. By 2004, an Argentinian team led by special prosecutor Alberto Nisman took over and conducted a full reinvestigation of the AMIA bombing, producing more than 113,000 pages of documentation. In the end, Nisman’s team concluded that the decision to carry out the attack was made by “the highest representatives of the Iranian government.” Nisman himself was very clear: “We were able to identify the perpetrator of the attack on the AMIA. The suicide driver is the Lebanese Hezbollah militia member Ibrahim Hussein Berro, and I would also add it’s proven that it was Hezbollah, the operative group that carried out the attack.”  

The court’s ruling also lent credence to Lee Smith’s speculation in Tablet, in 2015, that Nisman might have been murdered by the Iranians, rather than by Kirchner allies attempting to protect the president. Smith noted that Nisman, unlike other observes, had alleged that Iran’s motive was not to retaliate against Israel for assassinating Hezbollah’s then general secretary in 1992, but to punish Argentina for slow-walking bilateral agreements on nuclear technology. The Argentine court, according to The Jerusalem Post, found that Iran and Hezbollah were motivated by “Islamic jihad against the west”—and also by the desire to “punish Argentina for not trading agreed upon materials and technology that could be used in its nuclear program.”

→Quote of the Day: 

The struggle for Palestinian liberation today is led by the Islamic Resistance Movement—Hamas. Hamas is supported by the entirety of the organized Palestinian left. One might have expected that the left in the imperial core would follow the leadership of the Palestinian left in supporting Hamas. More often than not, though, left intellectuals echo the condemnations that imperialist states make the condition for speaking about Palestine. In so doing, they take a side against the Palestinian revolution, giving a progressive face to the repression of the Palestinian political project, and betraying the anti-imperialist aspirations of a previous generation. 

That’s Jodi Dean, the self-described communist academic at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, in a Tuesday blog post for Verso, the most influential publisher on the American left and a farm system for employment in more “mainstream” elements of the U.S. media industry. Although Dean’s position is insane, we admire the consistency of her principles. After all, who are Western leftists to insist that the “struggle for Palestinian liberation” should be secular, left-wing, or grounded in anything other than the political thought of Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb? Listen to Palestinian voices! Queers for jihad! Takfir on the social democrats! Claim the Verso loft for Dar al-Islam!

→Image of the Day: 

That’s total foreign lobbying expenditures since 2016, according to Open Secrets (hat tip to @HanShawnity on X). Note that, despite the constant hand-wringing over the “Israel lobby,” Qatar, one of the principal state sponsors of Hamas, has spent over$60 million more in lobbying than the Jewish state. 

→ A glimpse into how public opinion is formed in the age of social media, courtesy of a report in The New York Times, “How the War in Gaza Mobilized the American Left”: 

[Celebrations of the Oct. 7 attack by groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine] drew widespread criticism. But as Israel bombarded Gaza and launched a ground invasion, scenes of death and devastation in Israel were increasingly supplanted on television and social media by images of death and devastation in Gaza.

Those scenes began to define views of the war for many within the broader Democratic Party who strongly condemned Hamas but grew increasingly alarmed by the civilian toll.

One might hope that human beings endowed with reason would be able to understand that the “death and devastation” in Israel was the cause of the “death and devastation” in Gaza and assign moral responsibility accordingly. But the world of social media is an infinite present in which concepts like “causation” have little meaning. When the images on the screen change, opinions change. Hamas, which is nothing if not canny, has built its strategy accordingly. 

→A new systematic review of international clinical guidelines for children with gender dysphoria found a “lack of evidence” for transition treatments for minors and also accused the medical authorities who recommend such treatments of engaging in “circular referencing,” or exclusively citing one another’s recommendations to create an artificial expert consensus, according to reporting from Christina Buttons. The study, commissioned by Dr. Hilary Cass as part of her evidence review for the U.K. National Health Service, found that the main organizations that have endorsed “gender-affirming care” for children—including the Endocrine Society, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the American Academy of Pediatrics—consistently cited one another’s guidelines and conclusions without conducting any independent research, thus creating the illusion of widespread professional and scientific agreement on the safety and efficacy of these treatments. 

On X, Wesley Yang notes the parallel to the Collateralized Debt Obligations—bundles of bad mortgages deemed “safe” because bundled—that drove the Great Financial Crisis:

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

Tablet’s Passover Experience

Ready to be inspired? Join us this Sunday, April 14, in New York City for a one-day only event. Get tickets here

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Everyone Has the Right to Rest on Their Sabbath

Remembering when Joe Lieberman intervened in support of a Sunday-observing Presbyterian

By Nathan Lewin

“Do you know that Connecticut recently elected a Jewish Sabbath-observing attorney general?” That question was put to me in January 1984 after I filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to review a Connecticut Supreme Court decision that had invalidated, on federal constitutional grounds, a law that declared, “No person who states that a particular day of the week is observed as his Sabbath may be required by his employer to work on such day.” The court reasoned that the word “Sabbath” was not “devoid of religious overtones” so that the day specified in the law “comes with religious strings attached.” The Connecticut court concluded that this invalidated the law under the First Amendment’s clause prohibiting an establishment of religion.

The case had been brought by a Sunday-observing Presbyterian named Donald Thornton, who had been employed by a Caldor department store. When Connecticut repealed its compulsory Sunday closing laws, Thornton was assigned to work on Sunday. He refused, was fired, and filed a lawsuit citing the law that had been passed to mitigate the effect of the new law enacted to accommodate religious employees.

I read the Connecticut decision and called his lawyer to notify him that I would be preparing an amicus curiae (friend-of-the-court) brief on behalf of the Orthodox Jewish community to support the request to the U.S. Supreme Court that he would surely make. The lawyer replied that Thornton had died while his lawsuit was pending and that his widow would not pay for further litigation. I volunteered to represent Thornton’s estate in the Supreme Court pro bono to get the horrendous ruling vacated. Thornton’s widow officially designated me as the estate’s lawyer.

The state of Connecticut had not defended the law’s constitutionality when it was challenged in the state’s highest court. I did not know whether it would officially defend the law before the U.S. Supreme Court. I was, of course, eager to enlist Connecticut on my side. So I called the relatively new religiously observant attorney general to ask him to file a friend-of-the-court brief supporting my request that the court hear the case.

That is how I first met Joe Lieberman. He had been elected attorney general of Connecticut in 1983.

Joe expressed surprise when I informed him of the decision of Connecticut’s Supreme Court. No local law or procedure required notification to the attorney general when the constitutionality of a duly enacted statute was challenged in court. Connecticut’s Supreme Court had voided the law without asking the state’s highest legal officer to weigh in.

Lieberman responded sympathetically to my request but added his personal belief that the state should be more than a friend of the court. It should, he said, be a party to the litigation. He intended to file a motion in the Supreme Court requesting formal “intervention” as a party.

Invoking my years of experience as a former Supreme Court law clerk and, by then, frequent litigator in the Supreme Court, I confidently told Joe that he was too late. “The time to intervene was when the case was in the Connecticut courts. The Supreme Court does not allow intervention if it is first requested when a case comes before it.”

Joe brushed off my admonition. He filed a request that the state of Connecticut be permitted to intervene and a brief supporting Thornton’s refusal to work on Sundays. Our constitutional defense of the law and my request for review were also supported by the U.S. Department of Justice, speaking through Solicitor General Rex Lee and his assistant, a young lawyer named Michael McConnell (who went on to become the nation’s foremost legal authority on church-state law and a celebrated federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit).

Seeking to trivialize the case, Caldor told the Supreme Court that “nobody seems to know from whence this statute came” and that “this odd statute and odd factual situation is designed for consideration by moot courts and not by the Supreme Court of the United States.” But the case fascinated the justices. The files of Justice Harry Blackmun are publicly accessible in the Library of Congress. His law clerks’ memoranda recommended that the court agree to hear the case, and Blackmun’s own handwritten notes reveal the puzzling legal issues they saw.

The court agreed to take the case and, disproving my confident expert opinion, it granted Joe’s request to intervene. He and I filed briefs, and on the afternoon of Wednesday, Nov. 7, 1984, we both sequentially presented oral argument.

Justice Blackmun customarily took handwritten contemporaneous notes during oral argument. He would assign a numerical grade to the advocates’ performance and would identify the lawyers by age and by the law school they had attended. At times, he would note a physical characteristic. (I had started growing a beard shortly before the Thornton argument, and Blackmun’s handwritten note has my name, that I was then 48, and “beard now.”) Blackmun’s personally written notes reveal an idiosyncratic interest in the Jewish identity of counsel. When Blackmun believed that a lawyer was Jewish, he would put a capital letter “J” on the identifying line. His notes of Lieberman’s oral argument read, “blond,” 42, and “no look J.”

Joe opened his oral argument as follows:

As Attorney General of Connecticut, I am particularly troubled by the decision of our supreme court in this case, because of the message that it gives to our legislature, which is that any act that it may choose to adopt which gives special benefit or recognition to religious observance like the observance of the Sabbath is automatically unconstitutional. That is clearly not the message that this Court has given.

This Court has repeatedly warned against absolute and inflexible application of the establishment clause which would lead to mechanically invalidating any law that recognized religious observance in any particular way.

Representing the state of Connecticut, Joe told the court that the agency enforcing the law “quite clearly read it as not being absolute.” The court did not issue a decision in the case until late June, when it decided by an 8-to-1 vote to declare the Connecticut law unconstitutional in a short opinion by Chief Justice Burger because—ignoring the Connecticut attorney general’s authoritative pronouncement—Burger said it “provides Sabbath observers with an absolute and unqualified right not to work on their Sabbath.”

Joe Lieberman’s stint as Connecticut’s attorney general is a blip in his lifetime of personal courage and accomplishment on behalf of the United States, the Jewish people, and Israel. But his personal decision to inject the state into the case of a deceased Sunday-observing Presbyterian and the dismay he expressed, as he opened his oral argument, over the intolerant message that the state court’s decision conveyed to the state legislature were seeds of the independence and candor that marked his future public career. It was, unfortunately, not the only time in years of public advocacy that other authoritative voices failed to heed his words.

And, as all his biographers note, he was the quintessential American exemplifying the many who “stated that a particular day of the week is observed as his Sabbath.”