For nearly three weeks I’ve been suggesting with increasing forcefulness that the official figure of 1,400 Israeli deaths from the Hamas attack may have been considerably exaggerated. Here’s what I’d said last Monday:

The total number of Israeli deaths remains uncertain. The government has claimed around 1,400 fatalities, a figure universally reported across the entire global media, but nearly a month after the fighting ending, fewer than 1,100 names have been published, raising serious doubts about the reality of the larger total. Indeed, Blumenthal noted that when Israel’s UN Ambassador distributed horrifying images of the corpses of Israeli civilians killed by Hamas, many of them turned out to be the bodies of Hamas fighters killed by the Israelis. So it seems quite possible that several hundred dead Hamas militants were originally included in that 1,400 total, with the Israeli government being too embarrassed to admit its original mistake.

As far as I know, I was almost alone among Internet writers offering these bold speculations and I naturally received some sharp criticism for my “conspiratorial” thinking. But on Saturday morning, the New York Times carried the following short item:

Some have claimed that even this newly reduced total of 1,200 seems to include many Israeli soldiers who were subsequently killed in the weeks of Gaza fighting, so it might still be considerably inflated.

Just as I’d argued, the apparent reason for the Israeli mistake was that such a large fraction of the bodies recovered had been charred beyond all recognition, making it very difficult to distinguish between Israelis and Hamas attackers. But since the Hamas fighters had only been carrying rifles and other small arms, all those victims must have been killed by explosive tank shells and Hellfire missiles. Indeed, newly released video footage revealed that hundreds of Israeli cars had been incinerated by such munitions, suggesting that many or most of the Israelis killed fleeing the dance festival had probably died at the hands of trigger-happy Apache pilots, who reported that they had blasted anything that moved.

BREAKING