How Many Times Does HAMAS Have to Admit it is Lying About the Casualty Figures?

Destruction in Khan Yunis in southern Gaza | January 2015, Reuters

HAMAS has quietly removed 3,400 people it previously claimed had been killed by Israel in Gaza, including 1,080 children, from its official list of the dead.

This was discovered by Salo Aizenberg of Honest Reporting when he examined the documents put out by HAMAS in late March, which purported to be a comprehensive tally of every Palestinian fatality in Gaza since the terrorist invasion of Israel on 7 October 2023, amounting to 50,021 Palestinians.

This concession by HAMAS—pruning thousands of names that are blatantly fabricated—is part of its political warfare utilising the casualty figures, not a sign the tactic is being set aside. The prize for HAMAS is being able to claim the grim milestone of 50,000 fatalities. The HAMAS narrative is that its “ministry of health” (MoH) made a mistake, which was then corrected because it adheres to a generally honest methodology. Paradoxically, HAMAS hopes that “admitting an error” will give it more credibility, thus advancing its information operation. HAMAS has done this multiple times before.

An overarching caveat here: wartime casualty counts—even in well-known cases we have had decades to investigate, like the Second World War—are unreliable to the point of being borderline mythical because the totals are often generated contemporaneously by political actors for political purposes and then acquire a canonical status due to repetition by journalists, academics, and even government officials. By the time anybody thinks to check the underlying evidence, it is both difficult to get at and highly disincentivised by interested parties invested in the figures. As such, the chances of keeping an accurate tally in an ongoing highly complex theatre of urban warfare are zero, and this should have been the media’s standing assumption.

Once HAMAS’s undisguised instrumentalization of the figures was factored in, it should have made the media allergic to claims about the casualty figures. It obviously has not. The disturbing aspect here is that even if one takes HAMAS’s word about how the MoH data is compiled, it has been self-evident from no later than January 2024 that the numbers are junk, and yet they continue to be laundered by the international complex of “humanitarian” NGOs, “human rights” groups, and the United Nations.

The Gaza MoH being controlled by HAMAS should have ruled it out as a source for respectable institutions. In no war that did not involve Israel would it need explaining that the claims of one combatant—even if that combatant was not a designated terrorist group—do not constitute evidence about the other combatant. But on its own terms, the MoH refuses to disaggregate between civilian casualties and terrorists, and counts Palestinians killed by misfired HAMAS and Islamic Jihad rockets as victims of the “Zionist enemy”. Conceptually, this makes the HAMAS figures impossible to work with. In practice, however, it has proven far worse than that.

A few examples:

• For most of November 2023, the MoH did not report casualties at all, claiming that its communications system had broken down. The figures during that month came from the Government Media Office (GMO), i.e., HAMAS’s propaganda ministry. When the MoH reappeared, it had different numbers to the GMO. The U.N. omitted mention of the contradiction and blended the two numbers.

• HAMAS’s MoH has claimed that, in addition to gathering hospital data, it has been using two other methods: “reliable media sources” and an open Google document where Gazans can register not only the dead but the “missing”. The problems with this if it is true are too obvious to need specifying.

• In a prior “correction”, in early December 2023, HAMAS reduced the claimed number of male fatalities by 1,350. The U.N. asked no questions about how HAMAS had achieved a resurrection miracle on such a scale and merely recorded the new figure.

• What HAMAS was really doing was reducing the male fatalities figure so it could increase the female and minor figures to sustain its propaganda claim that 70% of the dead were women and children—a claim both HAMAS and the U.N. made long after the publicly-available MoH figures said the proportion was under-40%.

• Stung by criticism, in April 2024, HAMAS admitted that the records for one-third of the people in its then-total of 33,000 were “incomplete”. This was essentially a rebranding of the “media sources”-derived records, soon rebranded again as “unidentified”, an implicit and false claim to have a body while not knowing the identity.

• The GMO’s claims for non-adult-male Palestinian fatalities had gotten too preposterous even for the U.N. by May 2024, so the U.N. reverted to MoH figures, in the process reducing the combined claimed number of women and children killed in Gaza from 24,000 to 12,750. The GMO’s claim of 10,000 “unidentified” people “missing or under the rubble” was retained by the U.N., a concession of sorts that no hard proof existed these people were dead, and a cursory look at the MoH data disclosed 4,000 fake records. The dishonesty of the prior months was compounded by the U.N. never actually explaining how or why it had revised its numbers: its rhetoric was of a routine adjustment amid the “fog of war”.

Israel says it has killed 21,500 terrorists in this war, 1,600 of them inside Israel on 7 October. The media generally treats Jerusalem’s claims with scepticism, and for good reason. What cannot be innocently explained is why this same media treats HAMAS’s claims with absolute credulity.

HAMAS’s record, as sketched out above, gives no person of good-faith any reason to trust the figures it is circulating for Palestinian fatalities in Gaza. The “health ministry” data is not useful even as an approximation: it is hopelessly polluted on HAMAS’s own account, blatantly subject to statistical manipulation to increase the proportions of women and children, and any objective observer has to suspect there is large-scale outright fabrication.

Above it all is the fundamental fact the HAMAS MoH numbers are not derived from a process of factual analysis, but are overtly generated as part of the political warfare of a terrorist organisation. Trading in terrorist propaganda is not forgivable, even when the alternative is the unsatisfying admission we do not know the Palestinian death toll and cannot know it for years, if ever.