The above chart, created by the Israel Policy Forum’s Gabriel Epstein, is a summary of the latest Gaza death toll list put out by HAMAS’s “health ministry”.1 The list contains 72,835 names, each a purported fatality incurred between 7 October 2023 and 7 May 2026, and gives a breakdown of the fatalities by age and sex.
The top-line numbers are striking:
70% (almost exactly) or nearly 51,000 of the total fatalities are male;2
49.5% or about 36,000 of the total fatalities are adult males (aged 18-64);
30% or nearly 22,000 of the total fatalities are female;
28% or about 20,500 of the total fatalities are children (under-18), and about 60% (just over 12,000) of the under-18 fatalities are male;
4.7% or about 3,400 of the total fatalities are elderly (aged 65 and over).
Until quite recently, it was standard for the United Nations and its associated “humanitarian” NGOs to report that 70% of the Palestinians killed in Gaza were women and children. It was bad enough that these institutions were laundering the HAMAS death toll statistics—the central element of the terrorists’ political warfare—but in this specific case it was even worse. The HAMAS numbers have not shown that percentage for some time. What the NGOs and the U.N. were laundering was HAMAS’s press releases, which misrepresented their own data. Nor has the game entirely been given up: as recently as April, the U.N. claimed 38,000 women and girls had been killed in Gaza, a figure 75% higher than what HAMAS’s data claims.
Taking the numbers on their own terms, and with the obvious caveat that not all the males killed—not even all of the military-age males—were combatants, there is an immediate prima facie difficulty for the “Israeli genocide” narrative. The pre-war Gazan population was roughly 47% children (under-18), 25% each adult male and female (18-65), and 3% elderly (over-65), with a total female population of 49%. The sex ratio and the number of children in HAMAS’s death toll list, therefore, do not testify to an indiscriminate Israeli attack on Gaza’s population intended to destroy Palestinians “as such”, which would be necessary to meet the definition in the Genocide Convention.
Now we come to the first of the problems with the data: the use of child soldiers by HAMAS and the other Islamic Revolution units. The scale of the “martyrdom” notices makes clear that the terrorist groups routinely recruited older teens, aged 15 to 17,3 but the ages of the publicly celebrated child “martyrs” go down as far as 12-years-old. As HAMAS, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and the others are still in the process of releasing official obituaries for their fighters, these numbers will rise.
The jihadists’ use of child soldiers is reflected even in HAMAS’s data, where roughly equal numbers of males and females aged 0-11 are listed as fatalities,4 while twice as many males as females aged 12-17 are listed as fatalities,5 and if the bracket is restricted to 15-17 it is edging towards three males listed for every one female.6
To try to take account of this, and with the same caveat as before, we can calculate the males aged 15-65 in the HAMAS list: about 39,400 or 54% of the total fatalities, which is 77% of the total male fatalities.
This issue with the child soldiers is part of the broader problem with the HAMAS data, namely it does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. HAMAS treats everyone on the list as a martyr in the struggle against the Zionist Entity and heavily implies they are all civilians, a piece of disinformation often made explicit by HAMAS’s surrogates (witting and unwitting) in the global ecosystem of U.N. officials, NGOs, journalists, academics, “human rights” activists, “international law” custodians, and even some Western governments.
There is then the systemic problem that HAMAS attributes all deaths in its total to Israel, while the list in fact includes:
Palestinians killed by misfired HAMAS and PIJ rockets;
Palestinians killed in intra-Palestinian fighting between HAMAS and the clans;
Palestinians killed in common crimes (domestic abuse, banditry, etc.);
Palestinians killed in accidents;
Palestinians who die natural deaths.
It is also an open question whether the HAMAS death toll includes people who are not dead. The explosion at the Ahli Hospital on 17 October 2023 was widely reported as an Israeli airstrike that had killed nearly 500 people, and HAMAS’s running tally incorporated that explanation and number long after it became clear Al-Ahli had been struck by a misfired PIJ missile and perhaps fifty people had been killed. Whether those imaginary victims remain on the HAMAS list, and how many more have been added, is unknown.
HAMAS’s list does not include the dates of deaths, nor any indication of its data collection methodology, an understandable decision from its perspective, since its prior explanations—giving it the benefit of assuming the explanations were true—lowered the credibility of its data. This time around, HAMAS has at least provided complete data for each entry—date of birth, age, sex, identification number—but there is absolutely no way of knowing if this data is correct.
About 4,000 deaths were added to the HAMAS list between November 2025 and May 2026. This is, however, a net total, because HAMAS simultaneously removed 450 names. How HAMAS accomplishes these feats of resurrection at such regular intervals nobody knows—and nobody seems to care enough to ask, certainly not the United Nations, which simply and diligently updates its figures to match whatever HAMAS is currently claiming.
To round out where HAMAS’s claims stand, it said back in April that there are 8,000 bodies under the rubble, which would bring the total HAMAS-given death toll in Gaza to 81,000, far below the estimates of activist “studies” that have tried to generate fatality totals over 100,000 by relying on the “missing” and other statistical shenanigans.
There are three conclusions to be drawn from this. First, the problems with the HAMAS data are so grave—just the concrete, identifiable problems sketched above, not even factoring in the likelihood of outright fabrication—that the data is unusable to say what is true about the fatalities in Gaza. Second, precisely because the HAMAS data is subject to such extensive manipulation, it draws some lines around what can be true. It is most improbable HAMAS is undercounting the aggregate total, so that can be used as a rough ceiling. On the same evidence-against-interest basis, it is reasonable to treat HAMAS’s women and children figures as maximums, and its military-age male tally as a minimum. Third, the directional signal from HAMAS’s own claims about the death toll in Gaza points to Israel having waged a conventional war against a terrorist organisation embedded in an urban environment, and cuts strongly against the claim that Israeli conduct amounts to “genocide”.
FOOTNOTES
The list is dated 7 May 2026 by HAMAS and was released, “quietly” as Epstein notes, on 5 July 2026 by Iraq Body Count. Epstein has provided the data in a spreadsheet (direct download).
Exact figure is 69.96%.
For 0-11s, the exact figures are: 46.7% female and 53.4% male.
For 12-17s, the exact figures are: 31.9% female and 68.1% male.
For 15-17s, the exact figures are: 28.2% female and 71.9% male.