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“At least 81 Palestinians have been killed” in 24 hours in Gaza, the BBC reported on June 28, 2025, citing the “the Hamas-run health ministry”.
There was nothing extraordinary about this at first glance beyond the way that the media had become comfortable building stories around claims from an Islamic terrorist group.
Why 81 dead? Perhaps that seemingly random number is how many people were really killed.
And yet five months earlier, on January 16, 2025, the New York Times reported that, “Gaza’s health ministry said on Thursday morning that at least eight Israeli attacks in the territory had killed 81 people… over the previous 24 hours.”
What were the odds of exactly 81 people being killed in 24 hours on two different dates in Gaza?
Better than you might think.
In 2024, the United Nations passed on the claim by the Hamas “Ministry of Health in Gaza, 81 Palestinians were killed” in 24 hours between February 28 and 29.
A few weeks later, on Mar 18, 2024, the Daily Telegraph reported that the latest Hamas ‘Ministry of Health’ official “toll includes at least 81 deaths in the previous 24 hours.”
No one seemed all that surprised at the Israeli precision that had managed to kill precisely 81 people in 24 hours on 4 different occasions.
And then two months later it happened again.
“81 Palestinians killed in 8 Israeli massacres in Gaza in 24 hours,” the Palestinian Authority’s Wafa reported on May 26, 2024.
The media was claiming that Israel had killed 81 people in February, March and May.
If you think that’s incredible, consider the odds of Israel killing 81 people exactly a year apart.
“Medical sources told Al Jazeera that at least 81 people have been killed in Israeli attacks on various parts of Gaza,” the Qatari terrorist news agency claimed on May 26, 2025.
CNN backed up that same number and date contending that a “total of 81 people have been killed… in Gaza in the last 24 hours, the health ministry in Gaza reported.”
Israel had killed 81 people on the same dates in 2024 and 2025. Truly unprecedented.
But Israel kills 81 people fairly often on Al Jazeera, which also reported on July 22, 2024 that, “at least 81 Palestinians killed after Israel launched new military operation in Khan Younis.”
Why does Israel keep killing 81 people in 24 hours specifically? Obviously it’s not.
Forensic accountants (and high school teachers) look for the repetition of certain unlikely numbers as evidence of fraud. People faking their ledgers usually try to avoid round numbers and so they pick an odd number. But they often repeat that same number again and again.
People fall into patterns and having cited “81 people in 24 hours”, Hamas fell into the rut of picking the same number on multiple occasions creating the wildly improbable scenario in which Israeli air strikes kept killing 81 people.
But when people think that they’re being random, they’re actually following patterns. Some people have lucky numbers, a former address, a winning score or a wedding date, that naturally comes to mind whenever they’re asked to pick a random number. That’s something mentalists and magicians know how to exploit. And that may have also been the case with Hamas.
Numerology is a major matter in Islam and ‘81’ is seen as one of Islam’s ‘magical’ numbers. Muslims think of ‘81’ as a special number because they believe that they can see the numbers ‘18’ and ’81’ on their hands written in Arabic and that these numbers together form ‘99’ which is the total of names for their deity ‘Allah’. Thus ‘81’ plays an important role in their prayers.
Hamas may not have intentionally planned to cite ‘81’ repeatedly, but as devout Muslims, the number was already on their minds and when picking a figure out of thin air, they chose 81.
They may have been at it longer than anyone realizes because the earliest media mention of 81 in Gaza dates back to July 2014 when a CNN report claimed that, “At least 81 killed in Gaza.”
It’s possible that after this article comes out, they will stop, but also equally possible that they will keep it up because no one in the media had noticed it and no one will comment on it now.
CNN passed on Hamas claims that 81 people had been killed in Gaza beginning in 2014 and, since Oct 7, on Oct 20, 2023, May 26, 2024 and Jan 16, 2025 without doing a double take.
And the rest of the media is no better.
What’s at stake here is more than ‘81’, it’s the entire war propaganda narrative of tens of thousands of dead women and children delivered to the media by Hamas. If that narrative collapses, the push for a ‘ceasefire’ that leaves the terrorists in power, a mission that has become the core political activity of both Islamists and the far left, will also fall apart.
The media can’t allow itself to spot even the more obvious ‘tells’ of fraud. Including Israel somehow repeatedly killing precisely 81 people on different dates and operations.
To Muslims, 81 is sacred, but to everyone else it ought to be a measure of the Big Lie.
After Oct 7, Hamas took its hostages, retreated to its tunnels and counted on its Muslim Brotherhood parent group and the MB’s network of allies to launch a propaganda campaign based on fake atrocities and an equally fake civilian death toll. The media continues printing every lie sent by Hamas, sometimes at least citing the ‘Gaza Ministry of Health’ as “Hamas-run” and other times misleadingly calling the genocidal Islamic terrorists “Gaza health officials”.
81 is also the degree to which the media chose not to examine the numbers it was getting from Hamas. Why? Because the media wants the terrorists to win and it wants America, Israel and the rest of the civilized world to lose.
The next time you hear another nonsensical death toll out of Gaza, just reply with ‘81’.
