Here is the link to the full @HJS_Org report on Hamas’ fatalities statistics from Gaza:

henryjacksonsociety.org/publications/q…

We have very deliberately tried to omit value judgment and opinions from the report and give benefit of the doubt as much as possible. It’s still damning: there’s just too much wrong. Too many errors, too many impossibilities, too many signs of obvious data manipulation.

We wrote this not to give a definitive figure. We wrote it to give people the means to rebut the false narrative wherever possible.

We have relied solely on Hamas’ own figures to damn them. Our primary source, overwhelmingly, was Hamas themselves.

Let me break it down chapter by chapter.

1/9 Chapter 1 deals with the methodology of the reporting. There are three mechanisms. Fatalities are recorded through a mix of hospital reports, family submissions using an open-source online form, and “media sources”.

In each of the methodologies, Hamas’ own figures show men as the group most likely to be killed. Adult males made up only 26% of Gaza’s population before the war.

Men are dying in disproportionate numbers - especially men of fighting age. This chapter allows anyone arguing with the pro-Hamas mob to prove that Israel is targeting fighters, not innocents.

2/9

So, a day of hysterical reactions to events like the one below. And, as I’ve been saying all day, once again we can’t trust a damned thing coming out of Gaza. Let’s look at the reports from both sides.

A little thread 🧵

Here’s an initial take: “horrific massacre”, “massive number of martyrs”. Standard propaganda account take. This is the dominant narrative. 1/ Here’s MSF’s report and one from a reliable open source account. The number of dead match. Contrary to the hysteria this morning, and Mr Corbyn, no children identified.

2/

I was due to give this speech at the gathering this evening outside the UK Foreign Office, to protest David Lammy’s shameful decision to ban a small proportion of UK arms exports to Israel. Sadly, I am too unwell to deliver it in person. Here is the full text in 3 long posts:

My apologies for being unable to be with you this evening. I write this from my sick bed as and I thank XXXX for reading it on my behalf.

I served for 16 years in the British Army, leaving in 2021 as a Major in the Parachute Regiment. I completed three tours of Afghanistan, two as an infantry platoon commander and one attached to US Army Special Forces. Since leaving the Army, I have been a senior lecturer in the academic department of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. I am currently a research fellow at a Westminster think tank specialising in the Middle East generally and the Israel-Gaza war specifically.

In the last six months, I have visited Israel three times. I have had meetings with President Herzog, Prime Minister Netanyahu, Defence Minister Gallant and Foreign Minister Katz. I have met every level of the IDF, from strategic planners in Tel Aviv, to Commander Southern Command, two the commanders of both Divisions who fought in Gaza, to ordinary IDF soldiers. In the last month, I have been to Gaza and witnessed the destruction there first hand.

The international attacks on Israel come on three fronts: Israel’s reasons for going to war; Israel’s conduct during the war; and international lawfare.
Firstly, propaganda is used to diminish and downplay Israel’s reason for this war in the first place: 7th October. I have seen demonic footage of that day above and beyond that which is publicly available. I have watched video recorded by Hamas themselves as they slaughtered Jews with inhuman glee. I have walked in human ashes in Kibbutz Be’eri, Nir Oz, and Kfar Aza. I have seen the Nova festival site and spoken to survivors. I have visited the IDF base at Nahal Oz, where amongst other atrocities, Hamas burned alive 22 IDF soldiers. I am friends with hostage families. There is no question – none whatsoever – that Israel’s war in Gaza against the monsters of Hamas is both just and legitimate. Even after three fighting tours in Afghanistan, I have never seen horror that comes close to that which Hamas perpetrated on 7th October.

Secondly is the international propaganda campaign to force Israel to lay down their arms. Israel is fighting against a disinformation machine, funded by their allies in Iran, Qatar, Turkey and other nations. Their aim is to persuade the world that Israel is committing war crimes, so they will pressure Israel to ceasefire, so that Hamas can survive.

Have mistakes and errors been committed in this war? Of course, and Israel’s supporters must confront them head on and own them. That is what moral countries do. We have all seen the footage of the WCK aid convoy strike. An independent Australian investigation agreed with the IDF’s conclusions: it was a sloppy mistake that led to innocent deaths. The IDF has already undertaken procedural changes so it does not happen again.

We have all seen the videos of IDF soldiers misbehaving in the houses of Gaza: unconscionably stupid behaviour that has caused irreparable harm to Israel’s cause in the eyes of the world. Again, it should be easy for us to condemn this stupidity.

Personally, as a British soldier, I take issue with the IDF’s prisoner handling procedures in stripping detainees naked. By the same token, we have all read of the horrors of Sde Temaindetention facility and the assaults on prisoners that have taken place. All of these are objectively wrong, but none amount to a pattern of war crimes, and certainly none of them would have been prevented by a ban on UK arms sales.

Continues… (1/3) What really matters is how the broader IDF handled them. They have taken accountability, they have changed procedures and rules of engagement, and they have arrested soldiers where crimes are credibly alleged. They are behaving exactly as I would expect from any Western military in the same situation.

And Western militaries are innocent of none of these things. The cruel truth is that mistakes and law-breaking happen in wartime. When you train young men and women to be aggressive; arm them; and send them into the most extreme of situations; some of them will lose discipline and make bad decisions. This is a simple fact of war. The Australian SAS committed war crimes in Afghanistan, executing prisoners. The British SAS are undergoing an investigation into similar allegations. In Iraq, the British had Camp Breadbasket and Baha Musa. The Americans in Iraq had the Abu Ghraib scandal, the Fallujah killings and the Mahmudiyah rape and murder. In Afghanistan, they killed ten innocent civilians with a drone strike even as they were withdrawing from Kabul. War is never clean or easy. What matters is accountability for mistakes.

Let us now look at what the IDF has done right. They have taken unprecedented measures to protect civilians. They have evacuated over a million people from combat areas, in line with their international humanitarian law obligations. They have dropped millions of leaflets, made millions of phone calls and sent millions of text messages to warn people to get out of harm’s way.

Israel repaired the water lines to Gaza damaged by Hamas on 7th October. They have enabled field hospitals to be set up and have provided tents for the displaced. They have facilitated more aid into Gaza than was going in before the war. They have built two new vehicle crossings at Erez to replace the crossing destroyed by Hamas on 7th October. They have kept the Kerem Shalom crossing open and have built three new roads in Rafah to ensure that aid can continue to enter, even whilst manoeuvre operations are going on. They have even facilitated a route from Kerem Shalom to Gate 96. This route allows Palestinian trucks to drive through Israeli territory within stone’s throw of the kibbutzim where Palestinians massacred Israelis on 7th October.

I have seen IDF targeting procedures in their headquarters. They have taken unprecedented measures, exceeding their International Humanitarian Law obligations, with a specific cell set up to measure population densities in Gaza before any strike can take place. Whilst they use AI to help process intelligence to generate targets, the whole strike planning process is done by IDF troops who use a targeting cycle entirely similar to that used by NATO forces in Afghanistan. One in every two planned air strikes in Gaza has been cancelled due to civilian proximity.

The fatality statistics speak for themselves. With fully half of Hamas’ claimed 40,000 deaths in Gaza being Hamas fighters, there have been astonishingly few civilian deaths for a war of this nature. And here is the key point: not one war crime has been conclusively proven since the start of the war. Not one. The allegations made against Israel are nothing more than elements of a propaganda campaign to ensure that Hamas survive, and Israel lose the war.

This all links to the third and final element of the campaign against Israel: lawfare. We have seen cases in the ICJ and ICC. Even today, reports suggest that South Africa have asked for more time to submit their ICJ case due to a lack of evidence of genocide. The very fact they are asking for a delay exposes the fraudulent basis of this case. If Israel was plausibly committing anything like genocide in Gaza, the submission of evidence by South Africa would, by definition, be of the utmost urgency. This lawfare is nothing more than a tactic to once again force Israel to stop fighting and for Hamas to survive.

Continues (2/3)

A solemn “Shalom” from Kibbutz Nir-Oz. I am currently one mile from Gaza.

Here is a small thread of comments and photos to show you what happened that day.

I promised our guide, who was there on 7th October, that I would share their story with the world. So here it is. This is how close Nir-Oz is to Gaza. One mile. You can see (top left) the track down which Hamas drove on 7th October to murder civilians and take hostages.

“I heard about the attacks in the South. I called my mum to make sure she was ok… I heard Arabic men’s voices in the room with her. I hung up. I did not want to hear my mother being murdered.”
 
This about the Israeli hostages. It is also about their families.
 
🧵 1/ I will avoid direct reference to names except where I have explicit permission. Likewise, the photos are hostage posters I have mostly chosen at random. I will report only facts and my own observations.

2/

The best way to understand somewhere is firsthand. I went to Israel.
 
This is the first of a few threads. Everything I post is from primary sources and independently verified wherever possible. All photos & videos my own.
 
To begin: 7 October 2023.
 
Warning: violence.

🧵 1/ On 7 October, Hamas crossed the Gaza border in divisional strength. I’m going to use military jargon as this was not a rag-tag rabble. The numbers of trained and organised Hamas fighters were more than double the number of personnel the British sent to retake the Falklands in 1982.

They had detailed plans. Hamas had conducted reconnaissance of the kibbutzes near the border, possibly through some of the 18,000 Gazans with day work permits to enter Israel. Plans found on dead Hamas fighters showed an incredible level of detail on each house in Be’eri: “Man, woman, two children. Man has a gun. Dog does not bite”.

Hamas first attacked the houses of those Israelis known to be armed.

2/

Really important thread by @Doron_Kadosh that gives a counterpoint to some of the hysteria about Israeli withdrawal in Gaza. I’ll post the translation and drop the original at the end.

Five comments on the end of the maneuver in the southern Gaza Strip and the withdrawal of the forces from Khan Yunis:

1/ First of all - it was expected. The IDF said from the beginning of the war that the ground maneuver in its expanded format would last a few months, and then for about another year there would be a shift to the format of raids and targeted operations. Furthermore, the maneuver in Khan Yunis lasted 4 whole months, much longer than the maneuver in the northern Gaza Strip - less than two months The IDF delayed fighting in Khan Yunis for a longer period of time than expected, mainly due to the complexity of underground fighting that was discovered in Khan Yunis on a huge scale >> 2/ In the 98th Division that left Khan Yunis, there are brigades that have been fighting continuously for many months almost non-stop - the Givati ​​Brigade is the most prominent of them, which has been in Gaza since the first day of the maneuver, but the 7th Brigade and the Commando Brigade have hardly had a rest either. Fighting manpower is not a never-ending and inexhaustible resource, and this is of course also true of the heavy armored vehicles - tanks and APCs that have not stopped the caterpillars for 5 months in a row, and they also need a few days of care and maintenance >>

Allow me to introduce you to Captain Robert Barclay Allardyce of Ury, of the Royal Welch Fusiliers (23rd Foot).

In June 1809, this Scotsman walked a mile per hour, every hour, for 1000 consecutive hours, for the enormous wager of 1000 guineas. His epic walk took place between 1 June and 12 July in Newmarket, Suffolk, on a course marked by gas lamps every 100 yards. Every hour, he walked half a mile out, and half a mile back. He would generally do two miles back-to-back at the top of the hour, to maximise rest time.

You may have noticed @ClarkeMicah and I having an extended discussion (well, a quote tweet marathon - really sorry about that, but he doesn’t understand how the reply button works).

He’s been demanding a response all afternoon but I haven’t had time, so here it is.

A thread. 1 Here’s the article I objected to initially:

hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2017/02/lemmin…

His thesis is, in short, that Eastern European countries never needed to join NATO, and NATO’s expansion has therefore provoked Russia into invading Ukraine.

2/