Last Monday, NBC News ran a story on an Israeli airstrike in Khan Younis, under the headline: Women and Children Killed in Israeli Airstrikes on Gaza Shelters. It reported that the attack “helped push the death toll in Gaza beyond 45,000, most of them women and children, according to Palestinian health officials.”
The idea that most of the dead in the Israel-Hamas war are women and children is often heard in western media, which has been uncritically regurgitating Hamas talking points since the start of the war, furthering the narrative that Israel is using disproportionate force and perhaps even committing a “genocide.” Could this possibly be true?
Not according to a new report written by Andrew Fox, a former British army officer and senior lecturer at Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, for the Henry Jackson Society, a U.K.-based think-tank, which adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting that Hamas is intentionally inflating casualty counts, particularly among women and children, as part of its propaganda war against the Jewish state.
The report — titled, “Questionable Counting: Analysing the Death Toll From the Hamas-Run Ministry of Health in Gaza” — includes a meticulous analysis of casualty figures released by Hamas since the October 7 massacre that sparked the ongoing war in Gaza, along with a third-party media analysis on how the numbers have been reported.
It found “widespread inaccuracies and distortion in the data collection process” used by the Gaza Ministry of Health (MoH), including “significant daily increases in the reported deaths of women and children that are mathematically impossible.”
Indeed, Fox and his team uncovered a plethora of “statistical anomalies” that should immediately raise red flags. For example, on Oct. 26, 2023, the MoH reported 481 deaths, but the number of women and children killed increased by 626 — more than the total number who supposedly died on that day. On Oct. 29, the death toll increased by 302, while the number of dead women and children went up by 328.
Likewise, on Dec. 5, MoH statistics showed 1,041 deaths over a three-day period, while the number of dead women and children increased by 1,353, suggesting that “the number of men killed in Gaza actually declined over those days, despite heavy combat action.”
As the report notes, “No evidence has been produced to show that the IDF has deliberately targeted civilians, which is what casualty outcomes of the type generated by the ministry imply was happening. In fact, if the figures are taken on face value, they would suggest the IDF was actively choosing to prioritize the killing of civilians rather than armed combatants,” which is clearly not the case, given the number of Israeli soldiers who died on the battlefield.
Fox’s team also found inconsistencies between the ministry’s raw fatality lists, which show a higher proportion of male casualties, and its reports, as well as between data collected from MoH-run hospitals, in which men account for 42 per cent of deaths, and from families reporting through an online form, in which males make up 62 per cent of the total.
In what appears to be a deliberate attempt to increase the number of dead women and children, the report uncovered over 100 instances in which the ages of 18- and 19-year-olds were reduced by one year between reporting periods so they would be counted as children, along with adults who had been misclassified as kids and men who were listed as women.
MoH statistics, which purport to only include those who have died from “Israeli aggression,” were also found to include people who died in accidents or were killed by terrorists or other criminals, such as a young boy who was shot by Hamas last December while trying to obtain food from an aid shipment.
The official death count also includes Gazans who died from misfired terrorist rockets, such as in the infamous Al-Ahli Hospital complex explosion. Hamas blamed the explosion on Israel and said it resulted in 471 deaths. In reality, it was found to be caused by a misfired terrorist rocket and the United States and France said the death toll was likely much lower.
Based on third-party estimates of between 10 and 20 per cent of terrorist rockets failing to reach their targets within Israel, the report estimates that over 1,000 have detonated within Gaza since the start of the war, though how many people died as a result remains unknown.
Another glaring red flag is the fact that the Ministry of Health has not reported any people dying of natural causes since the war began. Based on historic data, the report estimates that around 5,000 people included in the fatality figures would have died naturally. It even found numerous instances of people who were listed as having died in war, but then appeared on lists of cancer patients weeks later.
Making matters worse, Hamas’s figures do not distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths. This is a deliberate, long-running strategy on the part of Hamas. In 2014, the MoH released guidelines for “social media activists,” which stated that, “Anyone killed or martyred is to be called a civilian from Gaza or Palestine, before we talk about his status in jihad or his military rank. Don’t forget to always add ‘innocent civilian’ … in your description of those killed in Israeli attacks.”
Unfortunately, these guidelines now appear to have been adopted by much of the mainstream media. An analysis of 1,378 articles published by eight major English-language news outlets found that 98 per cent regurgitated Hamas’s biased statistics, and just 16 per cent noted that they don’t distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Although the report didn’t attempt to estimate the true death count in Gaza, the numbers are not significantly out of line with many other modern conflicts. Hamas claims that around 45,000 Gazans have died since October 7. Israel says that, as of last month, it had killed at least 18,000 terrorists, along with 1,000 who invaded Israel on that fateful day.
By my calculations, that puts the civilian casualty ratio at about 1.4:1, or 58 per cent. Given all the inaccuracies in Hamas’s reporting, it is likely closer to 1:1, if not lower. But even if we take the numbers at face value, the 58 per cent civilian death rate is significantly lower than estimates for the Iraq War (66-67 per cent) and the Persian Gulf War (87-88 per cent).
In fact, the deaths reported by Hamas in all its wars with Israel since it assumed control of the Gaza Strip in 2007 (49,000) is dwarfed by the number of civilians and opposition fighters who are estimated to have died during the 10-year war in Iraq (223,500-254,000) or the 20-year war in Afghanistan (99,000).
While the war in Gaza has undoubtedly been devastating, and caused much harm to the civilian population, it is important to put the numbers into perspective. The data suggests not only that Hamas is engaging in a systematic campaign to make it seem as though Israel is deliberately targeting civilians — which the media is buying hook, line and sinker — but that, far from being some some sort of “genocide,” Israel’s actions are actually in line with many other modern Middle East wars.
Given Hamas’s tactics of hiding behind human shields and building military infrastructure in civilian areas, this is a pretty impressive feat.
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