Since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war on October 7, there have been myriad comparisons by journalists between the ongoing conflict and the US war in Iraq in 2003.
More often than not, according to a recent analysis by CAMERA, this is an unfavorable comparison, with the aim being to make Israel appear “trigger-happy."
CAMERA - the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis - presents itself as “the world’s oldest and largest international media monitoring, research and educational organization,” focusing on Middle East reporting.
In an article titled ‘The ruined landscape of Gaza after nearly three months of bombing’ Published on December 30, the Wall Street Journal weighed up the “29,000 weapons [dropped by Israel] on Gaza in a little over two months” against the “3,678 munitions [dropped by US] on Iraq from 2004 to 2010.” The idea behind the article, according to CAMERA, was to portray Israel's actions as disproportionate.
The statistics
The CAMERA report also used The New York Times and Associated Press as examples of downplaying Iraq statistics to augment the severity of Israel’s military actions. The NYT article plays with words, suggested CAMERA, in a way that emphasizes its dogma: “More women and children have been reported killed in Gaza in less than two months than the roughly 7,700 civilians documented as killed by U.S. forces and their international allies in the entire first year of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 (sic).”
CAMERA stated that, in reality, the “entire first year” of the US invasion of Iraq lasted roughly a month between March 19 and April 9, at which point the the regime fell. The majority of the 7,700 civilian deaths cited by NYT occurred during this period. By downplaying the intensity of the US invasion, CAMERA said, the paper by proxy “misleadingly portray[s] Israel as cramming a year’s worth of casualties into a month.”
Earlier this month, The Jerusalem Post reported on the apparent halving of Gaza casualties by the UN.
Between May 6 and May 8, OCHA reports decreased the total number of women and children killed during the war by 47%. According to the Washington Institute, the UN also indicated that adult men constituted 40% of the dead, contradicting previous claims that 70% of the dead were women and children.
When asked to explain this reduction in a press conference on May 10, Farhan Haq, Deputy Spokesperson for the UN Secretary-General, attributed the change in statistics to “the fog of war.” Earlier in May, the BBC reported the UN stood behind the statistics.
The CAMERA report questioned why the statistics taken from Gaza’s Health Ministry - run by Hamas - are believed at face value and used as a comparison point against previous wars, when in fact these statistics are “unreliable.”
“In truth, The New York Times has no idea how many Palestinian civilians have been killed in the fighting”, stated CAMERA, “Hamas’s policy of concealing the number of militant casualties is hardly a show of transparency.”
It should also be noted that Iraq Body Count (IBC’s) database of Iraqi casualties differentiates between those killed by the US army and those killed by other parties. As CAMERA stated, Hamas’s numbers do not differentiate.
As an example, CAMERA noted the Hamas Ministry of Health’s count of 471 deaths caused by an explosion at the al Ahli hospital is attributed to Israel, while the blast is actually believed to have been caused by a Palestinian rocket. Each misfire of a Hamas rocket or shooting by Hamas at Gazan civilians is likewise counted in the figures.
There have been multiple reports of falsified casualties, and incidents of Hamas fighters factored into civilian death counts and not military death counts. Earlier in May in a podcast with Dan Senor, PM Netanyahu said the death toll in Gaza was around 30,000, but that half the number was Hamas fighters.
In addition, reports have shown that approximately 40% of the casualty figures are based on unverified data.
Plotting the data of the Gaza fatalities against those from the Iraq Body Count (IBC) - the widely accepted civilian death report from the war - CAMERA showed that, from the start of the US invasion through to the fall of the Iraqi regime, the number of civilian casualties in Iraq was substantially higher than the number of civilian casualties in Gaza.
Even when using the highest Gaza estimate, the data “matches the numbers from the US war," said CAMERA.
The US killed an estimated 285 civilians per day, according to available statistics, from the start of the Iraq war through the fall of the regime. Hamas reports an average of 320 people per day, combatants and civilians, killed in Gaza in the month of October.
“The rate of civilian casualties at the start of the Gaza war was either comparable to or substantively less than the rate of civilian casualties in Iraq through the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime," CAMERA stated.
The differences
Statistically, the main quantitative difference between the death tolls of the two wars is that in Iraq, the regime fell quickly, and as a result, the rate of casualties dropped significantly after one month, stated CAMERA. While in Gaza, fighting has been continual over eight months, with the casualty rate decreasing slowly and steadily each month.
CAMERA also stressed the significant qualitative or ideological differences that lie behind the data; the US’s invasion of Iraq occurred with a 6,000 mile distance between the two countries and was based on the belief of Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction.
Israel, as CAMERA argued, was attacked from a territory a half mile from its nearest town. Hamas’s attack on October 7 involved the rape, torture, hostage-taking, execution and violent assaults against thousands of people on a single day. In the worst attack against the Jewish people since the Holocaust, babies and elderly were taken hostage to Gaza and many remain.
Also unlike Iraq, Hamas has constructed a tunnel network stretching hundreds of miles under Gaza, directly underneath civilians.
In an interview with France24 in February, Dr. Rob Geist Pinfold, an International Security Scholar, said the Gaza war involved “exactly the same mistakes by the way we saw happening in the Iraq invasion of 2003; history is very much repeating itself in the Gaza Strip."
According to CAMERA, these comparisons by media outlets and experts are “specious” and often contain “intentional attempts to mislead.”
“Reporters have increasingly been itching to abandon the pursuit of objective journalism in favor of activist journalism, which freely molds, slices, and twists news to ensure that readers don’t reach their own conclusions but rather those of the reporter,” said CAMERA in an article for The Jerusalem Post.
“But the war and its hardships should be discussed on their own terms. There is no need for dishonest comparisons, inaccurate quotes, and polemical reporting,” CAMERA concluded.