How people feel about Israel can fall into several camps. There are those that are ambivalent, those that are fiercely loyal to it, those who consider themselves fond of it but don't want us entangled in its disputes, and those who absolutely loath it.
I can understand the first three, but I can't wrap my head around the last one. There are a lot of countries out there that deserve your ire, but I'm not entirely sure why someone would hate Israel with all their heart and soul unless they subscribed to an Islamic ideology or are anti-Semitic, which is another feeling I can't wrap my head around.
The thing is, the need to hurt Israel runs so deep in a lot of people that they'll go out of their way to tell bald-faced lies to turn public opinion against it. You can likely recall more than a few instances yourself, but there's one that I recently saw that was so bold that I audibly said "wow" upon reading the debunking of it.
The attempt comes from "The Cradle," which likes to refer to Israel as genocidal and a number of its soldiers as "criminal."
In the article, it claims that a study from Harvard shows that Israel "disappeared" nearly 400,000 Palestinians, half of which were children:
The report was written by Israeli professor Yaakov Garb, who used data-driven analysis and spatial mapping to show how the Israeli army’s siege of Gaza and indiscriminate attacks on civilians in the enclave have led to a serious drop in its population.
The 377,000 Palestinians who are unaccounted for due to Israel’s genocide are approximately 17 percent of the Gaza Strip’s entire population, which now stands at about 1.85 million. Prior to the war in Gaza, the strip’s population was estimated at 2.227 million.
Firstly, the study was in the Harvard Dataverse, this does not mean it's a Harvard study. The Harvard Dataverse is an open repository that anyone can use, even if you're not at Harvard, meaning its peer reviewed status is suspect. This is not a "Harvard study" as The Cradle claims.
Secondly, the numbers are all off. As self-professed data geek Mark Zlochin noted about the supposed missing 377,000, the data that was gathered covered "three main Gazan population enclaves, with IDF estimates of the number of people in each."
As Zlochin notes, the sum of these three population centers totals about 1.85 milliion, but Garb never claimed that this covers all of Gaza's population. He then adds that Hamas pretends that "1.85M is the total remaining population, subtract this number from the pre-war 2.227M, and voilà: '377,000 missing!'"
⁶ But here comes Lie #2:
— Mark Zlochin - מארק זלוצ'ין༝ (@MarkZlochin) June 24, 2025
Hamas mouthpieces do pretend that 1.85M is the total remaining population, subtract this number from the pre-war 2.227M, and voilà:
“377,000 missing!” ⏬
And the bit where The Cradle says half of those are missing children? Where did that number come from?
Your guess is as good as mine.
But let's say that there are that many missing people. Where did they go? Did Israel kill them all?
Not remotely likely.
According to Al-Monitor, since the Israeli operations began in Gaza, notes that many Gazans are now in Egypt by the tens of thousands:
Since Oct. 7, 2023, the beginning of Israeli operations in the Gaza Strip, tens of thousands of Palestinians have entered Egypt through the Rafah border crossing.
Between 80,000 and 100,000 Gazans are estimated to have crossed into Egypt from Gaza since then, the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) ambassador to Cairo told Agence France-Presse (AFP) in April, without elaborating on how they entered.
Today, many of them, especially those who lack the financial means, live in the suburbs of the Egyptian capital, Cairo, in a precarious situation, with no rights and the constant fear of being expelled from the country.
And that's from what they know of. It's likely many are elsewhere and yes, some may very well be dead, but that's what happens when you start a war where genocide is one of the Israeli people is part of the to-do list. People die.
This entire thing was a shame meant to do two things. One, continue keeping the blood-feud alive, and two, generate anti-Israel sentiments in the west. That it was all a sham that could easily be uncovered as one doesn't matter. The people who want to believe it will, and the people who don't know any better might be swayed.
