Skeptical about polls predicting the result of the November election? Think again. With all their failures, they’re the epitome of credibility compared with Palestinian polling in Hamas-controlled Gaza. 

A widely-cited March poll of Gazans showed that residents of the Gaza Strip support Hamas by sizable margins. According to the poll, published by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, most Gazans favor the Hamas leader there, Yehya Sinwar, and give the thumbs-up to the massacre of Israelis that started the war.  

Oops. The Israel Defense Forces on Thursday published documents it had unearthed in Gaza, which show that the polling results were manipulated to make Hamas look good. The original polling data in the Arabic-language documents show that Gazans actually dislike Hamas and its leader. They also document that after five months of war, Gazans mostly disapprove of Hamas’s violent ways. 

So was the data published in the March poll a fake? “Highly unlikely,” the Palestinian polling center’s director, Khalid Shikaki, claims. He adds, however, that his poll firm would examine the documents that the IDF exposed. “Our Gaza team worked with us for more than 20 years,” he writes on X, “but we will investigate all claims as part of a commitment to ensure full quality control.”

The West Bank-based Mr. Shikaki is a prominent surveyor of Palestinian opinion. He is widely considered the only independent, and reliable, pollster in the field. His data are studied by world governments, including Israel’s, as well as intelligence agencies, think tanks, and the press.

Mr. Shikaki’s March poll, first reported by Al Jazeera, was picked up and was widely reported, including by the Sun. It indicated that post-war Gaza would hardly live in peace with Israel, and that Hamas’s rival, the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority, is no match for the genocidal terror group. 

While the PA is in some quarters considered an acceptable alternative to Hamas, many of its diplomats “at the United Nations, across Europe, and around the world, celebrated the attack on Israel on October 7, compared Israel to the Nazis, or made other disturbing statements,” the Jewish Chronicle reports. Those diplomats might have rushed to join the Gaza zeitgeist, or at least the version of it as reflected in the Hamas-manipulated March poll. 

Polling in Gaza is “like asking someone in North Korea whether you like the Dear Leader,“ a vice president at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Jonathan Schanzer, tells the Sun. “You better say yes, because you don’t know who the hell is listening on the other side of the line.”

Mr. Shikaki, however, writes that the documents that the IDF exposed were either faked by the Israelis in an attempt to bolster success in the Strip, or by a single Gazan hoping to extort money from Hamas. His Gaza polling team, Mr. Shikaki writes, is unbiased and stays away from the “battle over narratives” between Israel and Hamas. 

In briefings, IDF spokesman said that rather than cooperating with Hamas, Mr. Shikaki was duped by “clandestine actions to fraudulently influence the results of the polls.” Hamas is known to invest heavily in manipulating local and world public opinion, including, famously, by inflating Gaza casualty numbers. 

Hamas’s General Security officials “didn’t just invent poll numbers and then sent them” to Mr. Shikaki. “They actually conducted a poll — and then faked its results,” a researcher at Bar Ilan University, Netanel Flamer, writes on Facebook.

In the published version of the poll, 62 percent of Gazans said they were satisfied with the Hamas leadership and 52 percent supported Mr. Sinwar. Yet, the real results showed that only 31.9 percent support Hamas, while 21.9 percent favored Mr. Sinwar. 

“Who do you think will win this war?” In the published poll 56 percent were confident Hamas would, while only 18 percent predicted an Israeli victory. Yet, according to the raw data, only a minority of Gazans, 30 percent, believed Hamas would emerge victorious, while 51.2 percent thought Israel would. 

According to the actual result, a plurality, 32.2 percent said Hamas should govern Gaza after the war. Yet, the published poll inflated that number to 59 percent. 

In the published poll, 39 percent supported “armed activity” to achieve “Palestinian goals.” A “non-violent popular resistance” was favored by 27 percent, while only 23 percent thought “political negotiations” could get the preferred results. In reality, though, a plurality, 49.8 percent supported negotiations; non-violent “resistance” was preferred by 20.5 percent; and the Hamas-favored euphemism, “armed activity,” received 28.1 percent approval.  

“In an era where you see a lot of fake news, a lot of influence operations, it’s hard enough to trust polls, but it’s even harder to trust in places like Hamas-controlled Gaza,” Mr. Schanzer says.