Shortly after the start of Israeli assault on Gaza, which came in response to Hamas’s murderous Oct. 7 attack on its territory, Israel’s government claimed that its targeting of a major hospital in the north was justified because of the presence of an important command base secretly maintained there by its enemies.
Shortly after the start of Israeli assault on Gaza, which came in response to Hamas’s murderous Oct. 7 attack on its territory, Israel’s government claimed that its targeting of a major hospital in the north was justified because of the presence of an important command base secretly maintained there by its enemies.
Even long after most of the northern Gaza Strip had been pummeled into rubble and brought under the control of the Israeli army, no proof of anything resembling a major terrorist operations base has been shared with the world.
In the weeks that followed, as Israel’s offensive proceeded southward, reports of large-scale Palestinian casualties multiplied. As of the latest count, the number of deaths has been placed northward of 22,000 and is still climbing.
All the while, though, Israeli spokespeople have cast doubt on this accounting, saying that the real numbers are unknown and suggesting that the reported ones are unreliable because their main source has been the Hamas-operated Gaza Health Ministry. Even U.S. President Joe Biden gave this kind of skepticism a lift when he said he had “no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth.”
Then, nearly a month ago, came word from a report published in the Lancet, one of the world’s most highly respected medical journals, that a group of researchers had found no evidence of inflated mortality reporting.
As a columnist, I have felt the increasingly powerful tug of other topics. There’s the........