In the Media

Australian Jewish News – 8 May 2025

Since October 7, 2023, the casualty data from Gaza released by Hamas’ Ministry of Health (MoH) and its official propaganda mouthpiece, the Government Media Office (GMO), has repeatedly been demonstrated to be error-ridden and unreliable at best – and intentionally manipulated or even outright fabricated at worst.

Multiple analysts including Salo Aizenberg, Gabriel Epstein, Tom Simpson, Lewi Stone, Greg Rose and Andrew Fox have independently identified statistical anomalies and impossibilities in the data since at least January 2024. They have all concluded that both the topline casualty numbers as well as the gender and age breakdowns are unreliable. In addition, the claims made by the GMO and the MoH contradict each other.

These analyses caused the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in May 2024 to quietly halve the number of women and children it claimed had been killed, from more than 9,500 to 4,959 and from more than 14,500 to 7,797, respectively.

Previously, MoH death claims were split between “identified” and “unidentified” casualties, with the latter category responsible for most of the statistical irregularities. However, already last year it was clear that even “identified” casualty lists were plagued by errors and duplicate entries.

The “identified” category is now being further called into question, with Aizenberg noting on April 1 that at least 3,400 “identified” casualties, including 1,080 children, were removed from the MoH’s most recent list, released in March.

Several days later, the head of the MoH statistics team, Zaher al-Wahidi, admitted that many names on the latest casualty list had died of natural or indirect causes or may not be dead. Al-Wahidi suggested that Gazans were submitting false claims to try and win financial assistance. Consequently, hundreds more names have been removed pending investigation.

Perhaps the most infamous and damaging claim is that 70 per cent of Palestinian casualties in Gaza have been women and children. Simpson, Stone and Rose published a piece in Fathom in March 2024 comprehensively demolishing this claim based on the MoH’s own data.

Stone and Rose have now published a new analysis for the Henry Jackson Society, the most expansive and up-to-date statistical analysis on the MoH data yet performed. They conclusively demonstrate that women and children, the combined deaths of which they use as a proxy for civilian harm, account for less than 50 per cent of all casualties – and in some times and places, such as Khan Younis, as little as 34 per cent – despite comprising 75 per cent of the population.

This is before one factors in that Hamas and other groups recruit minors and the fact that overall combatant and Hamas-affiliated deaths are not being reported accurately, allegedly due in part to fear of Hamas retaliation. Furthermore, as Stone and Rose point out, some known mid-to-high-ranking Hamas casualties are being removed from lists, which could mean women and children may account for even fewer of the total.

The MoH lists do not distinguish between combatants and civilians – and Hamas operatives dress as civilians. It is thus extremely difficult to determine how many male casualties are civilians.

Stone and Rose also show how MoH hospital data contradicts the reported impressions of physicians and others that most of the injured they treated were women and children.

Additionally, Stone and Rose note that, in total, more than 6,300 names have been purged over the course of casualty list updates, with thousands disappearing between lists without explanation. They further show that the claims of verification of about 15,000 previously unidentified casualties are extremely dubious.

Moreover, some casualties from friendly fire, misfired rockets and extrajudicial killings by Hamas’ security forces are likely included in the list and misattributed to Israel, as are natural deaths, as the MoH recently admitted. Just how many is currently anyone’s guess.

The Stone-Rose report should be the coup de grace to the uncritical citation of Hamas’ casualty claims by journalists and politicians. Whether due to random error, manipulation or fabrication, these lists should not be used to make moral or legal claims about Israel’s conduct.

All we do know is that thousands of innocents have been killed in the war Hamas launched on October 7, 2023, primarily because of Hamas’ human sacrifice strategy.

Israel claims to have killed about 20,000 members of Hamas and other terrorist groups as of January.

The exact civilian-to-combatant ratio, as well as the total number of direct deaths from the war, is simply unknown right now, and may remain so indefinitely.

That said, we can be reasonably confident that the Israeli narrative regarding its casualty estimates and general conduct, particularly the fact that it doesn’t indiscriminately target civilians, is consistent with the available data – including from Hamas.

Oved Lobel is a Policy Analyst at the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC).