American humourist Mark Twain’s famous saying that “there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics,” warning that statistics, even when falsely used, can have enormous power, has been used with immense success by Palestinian terrorists over the last 18 months.

Hamas, the Islamist terrorist group in control of much of Gaza, has produced unverified and manipulated casualty data, which has then been widely and uncritically embraced as de facto credible by countless Canadian news media outlets.

In a syndicated opinion column that was published recently in the Hill Times, Chronicle Herald and Saltwire.com entitled: “Shocking differences between numbers of dead in Gaza versus Ukraine,” perpetual Israel critic Gwynne Dyer attempted to portray himself as a hard-nosed journalist investigating the veracity of Hamas’ claims, but ended up making so many methodological and factual errors that he made a mockery of the entire exercise.

Dyer cited Hamas’ death toll figure, acknowledging that Hamas does not differentiate between civilians and combatants, which is true. But he then concluded that this makes no difference, writing that, even if “all Palestinian men of military age, regardless of whether they were fighters or not” are excluded, “that means 59.1 per cent of the dead with ‘traumatic injuries’ seen in hospitals are children, women and old men: definitely civilians.”

Recognizing the obvious weakness in his argument, namely that these claims remain entirely unverified and coming from a terrorist group, Dyer added that “Although the Israelis claim that these numbers are false because Hamas runs the GHM, its reports are considered reliable by the United Nations, the World Health Organization, Human Rights Watch and the international media.”

Entirely aside from whether there is any value to whether “the international media” and fanatically anti-Israel groups like Human Rights Watch put stock in Hamas’ figures, this statement is irrelevant. As statistician Abraham Wyner has pointed out, “this war is wholly unlike its predecessors in scale or scope; international observers who were able to monitor previous wars are now completely absent, so the past can’t be assumed to be a reliable guide.”

Studies have shown that Hamas has registered adults as children, men as women, and that a disproportionate number of those killed have, as expected, been men between the ages of 15 and 45, exactly what one would expect in war.

Dyer, however, made no mention of these details, nor did he acknowledge that Hamas recently cut thousands of deaths from its own roster, including those who died natural deaths and those who died more than a decade earlier.

Not satisfied to peddle Hamas’ own unreliable figures, Dyer then looked to The Lancet, a British publication with a longtime animus towards Israel, writing that “a peer-reviewed analysis published by the respected British medical journal The Lancet in January 2025 concluded the GHM had undercounted deaths due to traumatic injury by 41 per cent in its reports, mainly because so many corpses still lie buried under the ruins of their homes.”

Here too, Dyer’s reasoning is without foundation. The very methodology used by The Lancet, called “capture-recapture,” is useful only with independent data, not when it is culled from the same source as Hamas’ figures, rendering it no more credible. Dyer also falsely claimed that the Lancet had published a “peer-reviewed analysis” when it was merely a letter to the editor.

Dyer, continuing to portray himself as a critical evaluator of world events, rhetorically asked why civilian casualties are allegedly so high in Gaza, dismissing Gaza’s dense population as an answer, concluding with this incisive comment: “the Israelis believe that Palestinians are…well, just Arabs.”

It appears entirely beyond Dyer’s knowledge to recognize that Hamas’ widely-documented use of its own population as human shields plays a factor in the death toll, such that it is, in Gaza. Rather than giving an honest assessment of the situation, Dyer’s opinion column presented a faux intellectual analysis, and offered a conclusion utterly superficial and absurd.