Last month, something unusual happened: Hamas began revising its own publicly available records of war dead, reducing the overall number by 3,400, of them 1,080 children. But the correction has gone unremarked by the media, which routinely cite Hamas’s statistics, also taken at face value by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. It is, however, no surprise to anyone who has paid close attention that these data were not only unreliable, but falsified. Maurice Hirsch notes, for instance:

From the start of the war, one of the clear themes of the Hamas-UN statistics was the maintenance, at all costs, of the rule that the number of women and children killed was constantly about 70 percent. This rule was maintained even to the extent of absurdity.

Thus, for example, on December 8, 2023, UN OCHA reported 17,487 casualties, of whom 5,153 were women, and 7,729 were children, together comprising 70 percent of the casualties.

Two and a half weeks later, on December 27, 2023, while UN OCHA reported that the total death toll had risen to 21,110, the number of women and children killed did not change. Incredibly, while the total number of deaths had risen, and while the number of women and children allegedly killed remained constant, the percentage of women and children killed also remained steady at 70 precent.

A more comprehensive report from the Henry Jackson Society identifies a number of techniques used to produce the falsified data: listing men as women and adults and children (to maintain the 70-percent proportion); listing natural deaths as war deaths; and deliberately attempting to reduce the numbers of those listed as combatants.

Yet, Andrew Fox, the author of this report, observes that arguing about these gruesome statistics is unlikely to win anyone over:

I saw John Spencer this week and he made a great point: stop playing this game. Stop engaging with numbers.

From a legal perspective, it doesn’t matter if you have a 1:1 ratio of civilian to combatant [deaths] if you killed all the civilians illegally. It doesn’t matter if you have a 100:1 ratio, as long as all civilian fatalities were inflicted in a legal manner. War is brutal. The taking of human life is immoral. The law of armed conflict (LOAC) puts a highly subjective set of loose boundaries around that immorality. This does not change the fact that combatants can kill enormous numbers of innocents quite legally so long as they follow the rules.

Getting dragged into the “numbers game” simply creates a tussle between the legal and the moral. In the wider eyes of the world, the legal can never win that fight. No matter how legally they died, we are still discussing the deaths of innocents. Legal justification will never claim the moral high ground. The key point is that no other army other than the IDF is expected to contest that moral high ground.

While I’ve seen much speculation—some reasonable and well informed, some quite the opposite—about why Jerusalem chose Friday morning to begin its campaign against Iran, the most obvious explanation seems to be the most convincing. First, 60 days had passed since President Trump warned that Tehran had 60 days to reach an agreement with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Second, Israeli intelligence was convinced that Iran was too close to developing nuclear weapons to delay military action any longer. Edward Luttwak explains why Israel was wise to attack:

Iran was adding more and more centrifuges in increasingly vast facilities at enormous expense, which made no sense at all if the aim was to generate energy. . . . It might be hoped that Israel’s own nuclear weapons could deter an Iranian nuclear attack against its own territory. But a nuclear Iran would dominate the entire Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, with which Israel has full diplomatic relations, as well as Saudi Arabia with which Israel hopes to have full relations in the near future.

Luttwak also considers the military feats the IDF and Mossad have accomplished in the past few days:

To reach all [its] targets, Israel had to deal with the range-payload problem that its air force first overcame in 1967, when it destroyed the air forces of three Arab states in a single day. . . . This time, too, impossible solutions were found for the range problem, including the use of 65-year-old airliners converted into tankers (Boeing is years later in delivering its own). To be able to use its short-range F-16s, Israel developed the “Rampage” air-launched missile, which flies upward on a ballistic trajectory, gaining range by gliding down to the target. That should make accuracy impossible—but once again, Israeli developers overcame the odds.