Study finds Western media outlets unquestioningly accepted Hamas statistics, which massively inflated the number of civilian casualties in order to ‘vilify Israel.’
By World Israel News Staff
Death toll estimates submitted by the Gaza health ministry have consistently exaggerated the number of civilian casualties inflicted during the ongoing war between Hamas and Israel a new report finds.
According to the Gaza health ministry – administered under the supervision of the Hamas terror organization – there have been a total of 44,930 fatalities in the Gaza Strip as a result of armed hostilities with Israel over the 14 months since October 7th, 2023.
Gaza health officials have claimed that the vast majority of those fatalities were civilians, with an analysis by the United Nations covering confirmed deaths during a six-month period early in the war suggesting that 70% of the dead were women and children.
Western media outlets have echoed claims by the Gaza health ministry, including CNN‘s Fareed Zakaria stating on air that Israel’s campaign against Hamas had “resulted in 35,000 civilians dying.”
However, a new study jointly conducted by the Fifty Global Research Group and Henry Jackson Society think-tank, has found that the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry’s death toll data consistently marked the ages of those killed downward compared to their information as listed by the Palestinian Population Register – thus inflating the number of children killed in the conflict.
“This misclassification contributes to the narrative that civilian populations, particularly women and children, bear the brunt of the conflict, potentially influencing sentiment and media coverage,” said the study’s lead author, Andrew Fox, in an interview with The Telegraph.
In addition, the Gaza health ministry fallaciously included deaths unrelated to the war, counting some 5,000 natural deaths as war fatalities, the report claimed.
These included cancer patients who were apparently still alive at the time of their alleged deaths from Israeli attacks, appearing on lists of those receiving hospital treatments, before dying later of their illnesses.
The report also accused the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry of including deaths caused by misfired Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad rockets, attacks by Hamas terrorists against Gaza civilians, or other internecine violence in their list of fatalities from Israeli attacks.
“The ministry of health, operating under Hamas, has systematically inflated the death toll by failing to distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths, over-reporting fatalities among women and children and even including individuals who died before the conflict began,” the report said.
“This has led to a narrative where the Israel Defense Forces are portrayed as disproportionately targeting civilians, while the actual numbers suggest a significant proportion of the dead are combatants.”
The United Nations too, the researchers said, is guilty of misrepresenting the data and conflating civilian and terrorist casualties.
“The omission creates a skewed narrative portraying all casualties as civilian, shaping public opinion and international policy based on incomplete or manipulated data . . with Israel accused of ‘genocide’, ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘crimes against humanity’,” the authors wrote.
In contrast to the U.N. report, which assessed confirmed deaths from November 2023 through April 2024 and found that 70% were either women or children, the Fifty Global Research Group/Henry Jackson Society report determined that the majority of all war fatalities in Gaza occurred among males between the ages of 15 and 45.
Analysing 1,378 news articles by major American and British outlets including CNN, the BBC, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, ABC, Reuters, and The Associated Press, the study found a massively lop-sided reliance on Hamas statistics, often cited without question.
The report shows that virtual all the articles assessed (98%) cited data provided by the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry, while just 3% cited Israeli data.
In this vein, few articles noted Israeli and American military estimates that of the Gaza war fatalities, some 17,000 were terrorists affiliated with Hamas – not including members of other terror groups, including Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Just 1% of the articles noted that the Hamas figures have not been independently verified.
By comparison, a whopping 19% of articles examined cited the Hamas-backed data as established fact, without even noting the numbers were provided by the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry.