Hamas quietly lowers Gaza death toll estimate by thousands

This is not the first time the terror group has been caught falsifying figures to incriminate Israel in global eyes.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Hamas unobtrusively deleted thousands of deaths from its war casualty count last month, including over a thousand children it had claimed Israel had killed, a media watch dog said in a report Monday.

“Hamas’s new March 2025 fatality list quietly drops 3,400 fully ‘identified’ deaths listed in its August and October 2024 reports – including 1,080 children,” wrote Honest Reporting board member Salo Aizenberg. “These ‘deaths’ never happened. The numbers were falsified – again.”

Hamas has consistently inflated its war casualty list, Aizenberg noted, giving examples such as a claim that 471 people were killed in an IDF airstrike on Al-Ahli Hospital early on in the war when the truth was that an errant rocket fired at Israel by Palestinian Islamic Jihad near the medical center had fallen into its parking lot, just injuring several people.

Those supposed victims were later quietly removed from Hamas’ count.

The Gazan terror organization claimed in March that the death count in Gaza from the 18-month-long war had surpassed 50,000, a figure that was widely reported to Israel’s detriment in global media.

It has also repeatedly claimed that 70% of the casualties are women and children, further inflaming world opinion and leading to charges of genocide against the IDF.

By closely analyzing the names and ages Hamas regularly releases in PDF form, Aizenberg and his team found that fatalities of those who could be considered of combatant age, 13-55, were 72% male.

The fact that among the teen deaths, 65% of those aged 13-17 were male, also indicated that Hamas uses child soldiers, the report said.

Using underage minors in military service is against international law.

Much of the world’s media do not mention the fact that the figures they usually cite from the Gazan Health Ministry come from Hamas, as it runs the government in the coastal enclave and, being a party to the conflict, it is therefore not an impartial source of information.

Hamas also does not differentiate between combatants and non-combatants in its numbers, and has almost never acknowledged the deaths of its armed forces in clashes with the Israeli army.

The report noted that the terror organization includes in its count everyone who died during this time period, including those who expired from natural causes, such as old age.

It said that about 8,300 of those reported as war victims were really natural deaths.

This would accord with the average number of such losses in Gaza before the war.

The IDF has kept a running count of the enemy its men have killed in the fighting, and says that 20,000 of the deaths are those of combatants.

This means that the ratio of civilian to soldier deaths is about one-to-one, a figure that is unheard-of in armed conflict, where even five to one is considered more than acceptable.

Aizenberg cautioned that the revised number does not mean that Hamas can now be considered a trustworthy source going forward.

“Is the March 2025 list suddenly credible? No. Dropping names does not equal accuracy,” he said.

“Hamas’ Ministry of Health was never reliable,” he noted, calling Hamas’ supposed effort at transparency “Managed fakery, dressed up as precision,” since “From day one, Hamas has gamed the fatality data.”