In his latest commentary in The Hill Times, London-based syndicated columnist and conspiracy theorist Gwynne Dyer dishonestly presented unsubstantiated Hamas propaganda as veritable truth, all while hiding his source from readers.

While his July 29 column, which was also published in The Telegram on July 31 entitled: “Gaza deaths are being used as a tragic pawn,” pointed out the obvious reality that Hamas happily uses its own people as human shields and that “nobody can say that Israel’s response was unprovoked” – facts that remains lost on many other columnists, Dyer’s column repeated unfounded Hamas disinformation with no attribution whatsoever.

Dyer’s opening line read that “the Palestinian death toll in the Gaza Strip since last October’s Hamas attacks on Israeli settlements will reach 40,000 people in the next week or so.”

In addition to using the highly charged and misleading term “settlement,” which created a false and misleading impression that Israeli towns near the Gaza boundary were in contested territory (they were not, other than by Hamas, which considers every inch of Israel to be theirs), Dyer offered no source for his claim of 40,000 deaths, let alone for his next line that the figure includes “around 50-100 civilians dead per day.”

The only source for the 40,000 claim is none other than Hamas, via its so-called “Gaza Ministry of Health,” an organization that exists entirely under the control of the Islamic terrorist group, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants, does not include those killed by errant Palestinian rockets, includes those who died through natural means, and whose numbers are statistically improbable.

But Dyer, either through malice or ignorance, evidently finds it easier to simply present Hamas lies as truth and hide the details from readers.

Dyer showed that he is not content to simply parrot propaganda from a terrorist organization, and soon proceeded to apparently concoct information entirely out of thin air, writing that “five or 10 or 20 Palestinian civilians—about a third of them children—will die as collateral damage for every Hamas fighter who is eliminated.”

There is simply no factual basis for this preposterous claim.

Firstly, Dyer cannot seem to decide whether it’s five, 10 or 20 civilians killed for each Palestinian terrorist, a staggering range. That should be the first warning that his comments have no relationship to reality.

Secondly, as far back as May, Israel pointed out that it claims that 15,000 Hamas combatants have been killed thus far, meaning that the ratio of civilian to combatant is closer to 1:1 than Dyer’s figures of 1:20. Even if Dyer would utterly dismiss Israel’s figures, instead of challenging them in his column, he simply pretends they don’t exist, a convenient if highly disingenuous tactic.

As for Dyer’s scandalous statement that “a third” of the deaths in Gaza are children, the columnist ignores that the number of youth (that is, those under the age of 18, which very well may include many combatants), represent significantly less than one-third of fatalities.

These numbers are not inconsequential. They show that despite Hamas using its own people as human shields, a point acknowledged by Dyer in his commentary, Israel has achieved an incredibly low proportion of civilian casualties, and certainly far lower than has been seen in virtually any other armed conflict.

Instead of bemoaning how “none of the local players cares a fig about dead Palestinians,” as Dyer did, he could muster the moral fortitude to point out that zero more people need to die if Hamas lays down its weapons and frees the hostages. Yet somehow, that patently obvious point is too complex for this syndicated columnist.