Slain terrorists, natural deaths, accidents, rocket misfires, and even killings carried out by Hamas itself are counted as “war victims.”

By World Israel News Staff

In the war over Gaza, numbers have become one of Hamas’s strongest weapons.

The Gaza Ministry of Health (MoH), which is run by Hamas, releases daily death tolls that are repeated by journalists, aid groups, and even governments around the world. But those numbers can’t be taken at face value.

The MoH is controlled by Hamas — a terror group with every reason to twist the truth. Its reports are not checked by any outside body, and they make no difference between civilians and Hamas fighters.

What looks like neutral data is really part of the battle for world opinion.

The lists the MoH publishes look official. They include names, ages, and ID numbers of people said to be killed by Israel. But behind the appearance of accuracy are serious problems.

Deaths of Hamas fighters are often missing. Residents are warned not to share information about fighters killed in battle, and many of their bodies remain buried in tunnels or unreachable areas.

At the same time, the MoH mixes in deaths that had nothing to do with Israeli strikes. Natural deaths, accidents, and even killings carried out by Hamas itself are counted as “war victims.”

Hamas rockets also misfire often — about one in five, according to Western military estimates — and many land inside Gaza, killing Palestinians. Those deaths, too, are added to Israel’s total.

Other types of violence are also included. With the collapse of law and order, criminal murders and internal fights between rival factions have increased. Yet the MoH lumps nearly every violent death into the Israeli column.

Between January and August 2025, it said only 1,309 bodies were recovered from rubble or remote areas — far fewer than the “tens of thousands” some activists claim are still missing.

Thousands of other names on the list come from “family reports” — people presumed dead but never confirmed. Some of them have later been found alive, either in Gaza or abroad. The lists sound precise, but the more you look, the less they make sense.

To see if the MoH’s numbers add up, researchers use a simple reality check called the injury-to-death ratio, or IDR. It measures how many people are injured for every person killed.

In modern wars fought in cities — such as in Iraq, Ukraine and Syria — this ratio is usually between three to one and five to one. Most people hit by shrapnel survive.

But in Gaza, the MoH’s own figures show far lower ratios. As of late August 2025, the data showed just 2.1 injuries for every death among children, 2.2 for women, 2.4 for the elderly, and 2.6 for men. That’s far too low for such a crowded place under heavy bombing.

Instead of showing under-counted deaths, the data points to inflated numbers.

The differences between men and women also make no sense. Men — many of whom are fighters — should have fewer injuries per death, since they’re often directly targeted in combat.

Yet their injury-to-death ratio is higher. That strongly suggests the MoH is hiding many fighter deaths while boosting civilian ones.

Some activists claim the opposite — that Hamas is under-counting deaths by 40 percent or more. One widely shared study said there were 75,000 violent deaths by January 2025  — about two-thirds more than the MoH’s own number. But when those totals are compared with MoH injury figures, the math simply falls apart.

The ratios drop to about one injury per death — something that just doesn’t happen in modern wars.

For those numbers to be true, the MoH would have to have missed more than half of all injuries — a claim no one can back up. You cannot inflate deaths by 50 percent and still make the data fit.

Even major media outlets such as Reuters and the BBC now warn that the MoH’s data comes from Hamas and cannot be verified. Most experts agree the numbers likely exaggerate civilian deaths and hide combatant losses.

As noted by Andrew Fox, a former British Army officer who has written and compiled the statistics included in this article, the patterns simply do not make sense.

The MoH’s numbers break basic rules of logic and experience. Until they are independently checked, they should be seen for what they are — part of Hamas’ propaganda war, not a record of the truth.

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