Hamas' Gaza death toll questioned as new report says its led to 'widespread inaccuracies and distortion'

A new report cites a laundry list of alleged errors in the casualty tallies that the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health has issued during the conflict in Gaza, and found that worldwide media widely report the inflated numbers with little or no scrutiny.

The Henry Jackson Society (HJS), a U.K. based think tank, found “widespread inaccuracies and distortion in the data collection process” for the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health (MoH) which has resulted in a “misleading picture of the conflict.” The study also analyzed how journalists worldwide have spread misleading MoH data without noting its shortcomings or offering alternative information from Israeli sources.

The report’s author, Andrew Fox, a fellow at HJS said his team’s research is based on lists of casualty figures that the MoH has released through Telegram as well as lists released by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Fox said he and his team have been able to examine segments of the reporting, despite changeable MoH data being “really hard to interrogate.” 

On Tuesday, Gaza health authorities updated its number of dead to what it said was more than 45,000.

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The report said the ministry’s reporting long indicated that women and children made up more than half of the war dead, leading to accusations that Israel intentionally kills civilians in Gaza.

“If Israel was killing indiscriminately, you would expect deaths to roughly match the demographic proportions pre-war,” Fox said. At the time, adult men made up around 26% of the Gazan population. “The number of adult males that have died is vastly in excess of 26%,” he said.

Within accessible reporting, Fox and his team also found instances of casualty entries being recorded improperly, “artificially increas[ing] the numbers of women and children who are reported as killed.” This has included people with male names being listed as females, and grown adults being recorded as young children.

Analyzing data by category has further highlighted biases within reporting. There are three kinds of entries within MoH’s casualty figures: entries collected by hospitals prior to the breakdown of networks in November 2023, entries submitted by family members of the deceased, and entries collected through “media sources,” whose veracity researchers like Dr. David Adesnik, vice president of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, has previously questioned. 

Analysis of gender breakdowns among these groupings shows that hospital records “are distorted,” with a higher percentage of women and children among hospital-reported casualties than in those reported by family members.

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Though around 5,000 natural deaths typically occur in Gaza each year, the study found that MoH casualty figures do not account for natural deaths. It claims that it also fails to exclude deaths unassociated with Israeli military action from its count. This includes individuals believed to have been killed by Hamas, like 13-year-old Ahmed Shaddad Halmy Brikeh, who appears on a casualty list from August despite reports indicating he had “been shot dead by Hamas” while trying to get food from an aid shipment in December 2023. The list also excludes individuals killed by Hamas’ rockets, about 1,750 of which “fell short within the Gaza strip” between October 2023 and July 2024.

Fox and his team also found individuals who died before the conflict began had been added to MoH casualty counts. In addition, at least three cancer patients whose names were included in lists to leave the Gaza Strip for treatment in April had been listed as dead during the month of March.

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The ministry does not separate combatants and civilians in its casualty figures. Though the study states that Israeli forces have killed around 17,000 Hamas terrorists, Fox said that his research indicated the death toll may include as many as 22,000 members of Hamas. He said his research supports the fact that around 15,000 of the dead in Gaza are women and children, and 7,500 are non-combatant adult males.

“Collecting these sorts of lists in a war zone is a hugely challenging thing,” Fox admitted, but he stated that the MoH’s mistakes, whether innocent or deliberate, show that the institution is “really unreliable.” 

Despite this unreliability, the Henry Jackson Society’s survey of reporting of the conflict found that 98% of media organizations it looked at utilized fatality data from MoH versus 5% who cited Israeli figures. Fox found that “fewer than one in every 50 articles [about the conflict] mentioned that the figures provided by the MoH were unverifiable or controversial,” though “Israeli statistics had their credibility questioned in half of the few articles that incorporated them.” 

As an illustration of the phenomenon witnessed in the survey, Fox pointed out what he called an “incredibly biased” article from a British broadcaster that recently emerged citing MoH data claiming that there have been more than 45,000 deaths in Gaza. Though its report mentions MoH data, it does not break down the numbers of combatants and civilians, and does not mention the questionable veracity of MoH reporting. Instead, it parrots MoH claims, reporting that women and children make up for over half of the fatalities.

“It’s just a great example of everything we’ve written in the report,” Fox said.