We are all familiar with the phrase, “Repeat a lie often enough, and it becomes the truth.”
It usually refers to a propaganda campaign, mainly attributed to the work of the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Now, anti-Israel activists are pushing the same lies, not just in the media and on elite campuses, but in medical journals as well.
The Lancet, an esteemed UK medical magazine, one which prides itself on having “extremely high standards,” published a piece earlier this week written by three doctors – Rasha Khatib, Martin McKee and Salim Yusuf – who claimed that “it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.”
For some additional context, two of the writers, Rasha Khatib and Martin McKee, have a long history of anti-Israel bias, with Khatib also believing that any and all violence against Israelis is justified. In a Facebook post from 2014, when referring to the Ramallah lynching, where a Palestinian mob killed and mutilated the bodies of two Israelis, she wrote that the actions were an “inevitable response” and downplayed Palestinian violence.
This is one of the academics who wrote a non peer reviewed letter to The Lancet claiming without evidence that the death toll in Gaza is 186,000. Rasha Khatib celebrated the 2000 Ramallah Lynching pic.twitter.com/nMOSz3EYwQ
— Drew Pavlou (@DrewPavlou) July 10, 2024
This supposed high-standard piece of journalism was nothing more than disinformation and propaganda, attempting to paint Israel as guilty of genocide. Yet, several prominent anti-Israel figures, including the notorious white supremacist Jackson Hinkle and Palestinian writer Muhammad El-Kurd, who is known for his pro-terror support, all shared this as a legitimate publication. Even UN rapporteur Francesca Albanese, who was previously a lawyer with UNRWA and claims to be a law expert, quoted the piece.
The irony is that it wasn’t a peer-reviewed article but a letter to the editor. Anyone can write a letter to the editor; it doesn’t even have to be accurate. The journal published it under the “correspondence” section of their website and made it clear that this section is generally not peer-reviewed. The Lancet is also not without its controversies, as it was the medical journal that published the first fraudulent study that claimed the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine caused autism in 1998. It was retracted in 2010 – 12 years later – due to serious ethical concerns and fraudulent practices.
Disinformation and unreliable sources
THERE ARE multiple issues to call out regarding this “gold-standard” publication. The entire premise of the article (aka “letter”) argues that conflicts lead to non-combatant deaths, meaning that the fatalities can be as high as 186,000 due to “indirect deaths.” Yet the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health casualty numbers already included indirect deaths, which the authors did not adjust for. The 186,000 figure also includes “post-conflict deaths.” However, according to international law, any deaths that occur after the war’s conclusion are not counted as part of the official death toll.
Early in the article, they write that the Hamas casualty figures were “accepted as accurate by Israeli intelligence services” – but this claim is false. The authors cite one Vice article that references a Mekomit article claiming that unnamed Israeli “intelligence sources” found Hamas numbers reliable. There is also no evidence that some Gazan “first responders” are counting bodies in addition to “Gaza Health Ministry.” They are relying on a fringe news item based on unidentified sources to legitimize Hamas’s numbers.
The authors also claim the UN estimates that 35% of Gaza has been destroyed, but the UN study referenced cites only 12%. They also present all the deaths as civilians and ignore that 17,000 terrorists have been killed, ignore the thousands of natural deaths, and ignore any deaths that were caused by Hamas or Islamic Jihad terrorists themselves from misfiring rockets.
I have not been able to scratch the surface of the amount of false information in this piece. It is disinformation masquerading as “reliable research,” which cites unreliable sources, presents gross misrepresentations, and suffers from omissions. Even one of the writers, Prof. Martin McKee, retracted from the numbers he presented and co-signed on, claiming that “our piece has been greatly misquoted and misinterpreted.”
The Lancet once again allowed disinformation to spread on what is considered a “well-respected magazine” with a readership of 36 million people. When healthcare and medical professionals and policymakers read such reports, it has a direct impact on the Jewish state that is fighting an unprecedented urban war where the terrorists are hiding under the civilian population.
These three authors completely misconstrued the reality and repeated falsehoods based on fringe sources. We live in a world where the facts matter and should matter, especially when the lives of Israelis and Palestinians are at stake.
The writer is a social media activist with over 10 years of experience working for Israeli and Jewish causes and cause-based NGOs. She is the co-founder and COO of Social Lite Creative, a digital marketing firm specializing in geopolitics.