Hamas’ own death statistics damn its anti-Israel rhetoric

The new numbers prove that Israel is succeeding in protecting women and children in Gaza.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

The Hamas-run Gazan Health Ministry issued its official update Sunday on the death toll in the war in the coastal enclave, and its own numbers damn the terrorist organization’s war crimes charges against Israel.

The ministry claimed that 60,199 people have been killed so far and broke the numbers down by age and sex.

Almost 31% are under the age of 18 (18,430); 16% are women (9,735); and 7.3% (4,429) are over the age of 59, which it classified as “elderly.”

The Gazan population is approximately half female and half male, according to the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics, and the update shows that the IDF has successfully managed to protect a large proportion of the female population.

Another statistic touted by the bureau is that the Gazan population is very young on average, with fully 47% being minors.

Thus, the death toll among children is also substantially less than their proportion of the population.

This could be considered remarkable because Hamas recruits many underage fighters, some even as young as 15, despite such a practice being against international law.

These statistics contradict previous, loudly proclaimed Hamas charges that Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza based on the terrorists’ claims that about 70% of fatalities in Gaza are women and children.

Another important point is that the ministry’s report followed its usual practice of not making a distinction between combatants’ and noncombatants’ deaths.

This makes it impossible to know how many of those under 18 who died were killed in battle with the IDF, which makes them legitimate military targets.

It is also unknown how many of the “elderly” who were killed were part of the Hamas fighting forces.

For example, the majority of the terrorist leadership cadre were over age 59 before the IDF assassinated them.

This non-differentiation also leads to much of the global media reporting the total as if all the victims were civilians. The IDF has said that at least one-third of those Gazans killed in the 21-month war so far are terrorists.

Such a low, two-to-one civilian-to-fighter ratio is widely acknowledged in the West as an unheard-of achievement by an army, especially one fighting in dense urban settings.

Abu Ali Express, an Israeli channel that covers Arab affairs on social media, pointed out Sunday that the report also counted those who died of natural causes as having been casualties of war.

Offering a prewar statistic, the channel wrote, “In 2022, about 7,000 people died naturally in the Strip,” which means that “many of those who died naturally have become ‘shahids’ (martyrs) in this war.”

Any numbers coming out of Gaza have been shown to be highly questionable over the course of the war, with reports proving that the terrorists have inflated Palestinian death tolls numerous times.