Why Israel’s casualty reports still don’t add up, with Jon Elmer

you know Israel is lying about uh the battalions in Gaza uh they lie about everything obviously um but uh but this is about the the the the count of their own soldiers uh deaths so um yot aote one of the major Israeli newspapers says that no less than 10,000 soldiers who were killed or wounded during the long months of fighting in the Gaza Strip are missing from the Israeli Army today according to the data of the ministry of defense's Rehabilitation division every month about a thousand new soldiers join the ranks of the physically and mentally wounded none of this has stopped the knesset and the government from smearing the legislation of the law extending the mandatory mandatory service and leaving the regular soldiers in the Israeli Army in great frustration and with question marks so they're saying um the Army is suffering from a shortage of at least 10,000 soldiers killed ear wounded during the long months of fighting what do you make of this what do we know about the Israeli uh casualty figures if we know anything again uh we don't know we don't know they they don't match they they don't ever match they very rarely match they the sniper operation that we showed uh with the soldier hanging out of the tank they acknowledge that one because you know for whatever reason that one was acknowledged and you can track it and connect it but um one of of the jobs that I do is to try to match the operations what the Israelis say they're doing what the um cassan brigades are doing and see if you can make the match when we watch a video of uh a booby trapped home where we just saw nine triangles entering that home um you look for a nine triangle you just don't find it mass casualty events you just don't find um being reported the Israelis report at at this time they're reporting like one or two deaths a week uh and we watch videos where we're seeing multiple um killed on each Battlefront so they've been lying about their casualties I I don't know any other way to say it I I'm pretty confident uh when you see numbers like this the rehab division is the defense Ministries rehab Division and I think one of the reasons why the rehab division statistics come out is because like through the military sensor the military sensor is the reason why we don't know the casualties they're hiding them um and they have to be approved by the military sensor but I believe that the reason these rehab division from the defense Ministry stats get out is because they need additional funding from the government so the defense Ministry is allowing these stats to come out because these stats 10,000 that's consistent with what the rehab division has been saying um the rehabilitation division um of the defense Ministry has been saying for months in June the number was 7,000 so they've added 3,000 which matches this number they're adding a thousand soldiers a month to their um to their casualty list but if you go to the uh Ministry of Foreign Affairs casualty list it runs a daily casualty list it's nothing even close to that if you go to the idf's casualty list which they acknowledge um their casualties it's uh under 2,000 um and it stays there even though we see um operations this week like in Rafa they just announced I'm not sure if I read it on air but they announced that there was eight wounded soldiers in one of those booby traps um you don't see the number Spike um they seem to stay at the same number all the time so I think it's fair to say they're are lying about their casualties we I reported on this a number of times but one time back in in December it looked like haritz was pressuring the IDF to release the numbers and they were going to the hospitals and trying to get numbers from each of the hospitals and then that was the 10th of December I have the numbers here 10,548 soldiers were wounded and admitted to hospital between October 7th and December 10th so in December 10th there was 10,000 and then the war has gone on for 250 days since then so something's not adding up but what we do know we do know that there are spoke IDF spokespersons um soldiers in every single Hospital controlling information and this is one of the things that the haratz article was trying to um it seemed like haritz was going to expose them um and you know this was the article where they they listed the hospitals like um you know the ascalon uh Hospital alone uh 3,000 people in that hospital alone uh 1500 of them in ashod uh barila 2,000 uh admitted in those ones you know you have entire hospitals in December when there had only been uh 35 days of ground War uh putting out these numbers that if those would continue or even if they continued and were in Decline would get you far above 10,000 so it's not clear um exactly why the rehab numbers come out but these are people who are seriously wounded who are who have lost limbs and are learning how to walk um you know there's talk in the Israeli media about how Israel needs to really uh expand their um accessibility like we they people saying like we park our cars on the sidewalks like we can't do that anymore we need to have ramps into buildings because they have so many wounded um soldiers in wheelchairs um that they're going to need um to change the physical infrastructure of their cities to accommodate the costs that this war has has taken and so um I don't know that I don't know how deeply they can lie about this the numbers like and and how long they can do it but they're clearly hiding their casualties um because it lowers the morale and it makes it look like they're not being successful in the war and they have a conscription Army uh who might not want to know what the total number is but this goes against uh Israel's history they they used to put the names of people out right away or reasonably right away um and then yeah on the um was it on yam Kapur where they they like list the names on TV right like on a scroll on TV um that's not what's happening this time [Music]