Nobody Knows the Number of Palestinian Casualties in Gaza

And We Should Judge Harshly Those Who Pretend Otherwise

Scenes from a riot that erupted after a false claim was spread that Israel had bombed a hospital in Gaza, 17 October 2023 || image source

WHY IT MATTERS

Since HAMAS, the Palestinian department of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), led the genocidal pogrom in Israel on 7 October 2023,¹ igniting the war that passed the one-year mark last week, the strategic centre-piece of HAMAS’s campaign has been a drive to inflate—in reality and in perception—the number of Palestinian casualties. HAMAS’s intention is to get as many Palestinian civilians killed as it takes to save itself by generating international political pressure to stop Israel’s defensive military actions.

The practical side of HAMAS’s human sacrifice strategy is accomplished by the tunnels network—created using international aid money—which shelters only terrorists and their weapons (and the Israeli hostages), while being embedded throughout the civilian population in Gaza, with the tunnel entrances at “protected sites” like hospitals, schools, and mosques. The perception side is achieved through information operations, specifically HAMAS putting out casualty figures in the name of the “Gaza health ministry”, the problems with which we will get into momentarily.

The international media and an ecosystem of interrelated entities—from “human rights” NGOs and Western academia to the United Nations system—have played along with HAMAS’s active measures. In any conflict not involving Israel, it would go without saying that the claims of one combatant against another—especially when the claiming combatant is a terrorist organisation—should not be disseminated uncritically by journalists, and yet most of the press continues to do just this for HAMAS’s casualty claims, often by using the wilfully deceptive fig-leaf of quoting the “health ministry” as if it is an independent entity.

“International law”, a baleful illusion at the best of times, has been weaponised to ensure HAMAS was not deprived of its human sacrifices—any attempt to evacuate Gazan civilians from imminent theatres of combat was declared to be “ethnic cleansing”—and then to use the resulting deaths to wage political warfare against Israel at the U.N. “World Court”, where HAMAS’s allies have sought to invert the perpetrator and victims of genocide.² U.N. “human rights” agencies have joined in, and intermittently spin the wheel to decide on some new baseless accusation of criminality they can launch at Israel, along with demands that HAMAS be left alone forthwith.

The terrible scenes in Gaza that have resulted from Iran/HAMAS’s war have created a barrier that often prevents even decent people who know better from speaking up, specifically about the unreliability of the HAMAS-derived casualty figures. As I noted back in January:

The beauty of this active measure for HAMAS is that it is difficult to even talk about the fact that it is an active measure. It is an inherently distasteful topic, and anyone who questions the numbers in circulation for Palestinian civilian casualties can be portrayed as themselves engaging in propaganda on behalf of Israel, not to mention being callous, racist, and God-knows whatever other buzzword is in vogue that week.

“Genocide denier” is a favourite accusation at the present time, a nice encapsulation of the way ideological-political assumptions prevail over facts among activists.

The way to cut through this is for journalists and analysts who are not pro-HAMAS (or anti-Israel) activists to simply do their jobs, and refuse to be deterred by emotional blackmail from terrorists and their sympathisers. Those journalists and analysts who consciously use the unreliable HAMAS numbers and other agitprop as their method in pursuing what they honestly believe to be the humanitarian end of pressuring Israel into a ceasefire have to realise that, in addition to their behaviour being grossly unethical, they are contributing to an extremely dangerous situation that runs counter to their own purposes: they are incentivising HAMAS to continue with its human sacrifice strategy, and demonstrating to other terrorists that they can profit by endangering civilians en masse.³

CONCEPTUAL PROBLEMS WITH FIGURES FROM THE “GAZA HEALTH MINISTRY”

There are two levels to the conceptual problem with accepting figures from the “Gaza health ministry” or “ministry of health” (MOH).⁴

First, any area captured by the totalitarian Islamic Revolution has no independent institutions, and HAMAS—though originating as part of the Muslim Brotherhood—has been within the IRGC Network for decades. So by definition, there are no independent institutions, official or societal, in the Gaza Strip, any more than there are in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon,⁵ or the parts of Yemen ruled by Ansarallah (or “the Houthis”). And the evidentiary particulars of just how tightly HAMAS and the other IRGC units like Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ)—a direct outgrowth of the Iranian Revolution—control the hospitals in Gaza has piled up as the war has gone on.

The paradigmatic demonstration of this fact this time around was the infamous fiasco with the Ahli Hospital ten days after the Simchat Torah pogrom in October 2023. Western and regional media outlets relayed the MOH claims that Israel had bombed a hospital in Gaza and killed 500 people, only for it to become clear hours later a misfired IRGC rocket had landed in the hospital carpark, starting a fire that killed at most 50 people. For an honest media, this would have been absorbed and changes made to prevent a repeat. Instead, some outlets, notably The New York Times, made superficial changes amid the acute embarrassment of the moment, such as prefacing the “Gaza health ministry” with “HAMAS-run”, but quickly slipped back into old habits as the news-cycle moved on and the public-relations pressures subsided. As recently as 4 October 2024, the Times wrote of casualties in Gaza and sourced it to “local health officials”, without any indication that such people are operatives, co-optees, or hostages of HAMAS.

What makes this worse is that everyone has known this for a decade and more.⁶

The second conceptual problem with figures from the “Gaza health ministry” is the presentation of the data itself, which subdivides into two main issues.

One: the MOH attributes every fatality in Gaza to “the Zionist entity”. Yet, it is known that the missiles fired by HAMAS and the other IRGC units regularly fall short of Israel and land in the Strip, causing Palestinian civilian casualties. These events are rarely reported—Al-Ahli is the outstanding exception, receiving widespread attention—but we know, from this war and prior rounds, that the HAMAS/PIJ missile misfire rate is 15% to 20%. HAMAS has fired 14,000-plus missiles at Israel since October 2023, most of them from densely-populated civilian zones, including the actual tents of displaced people, meaning any mishap will lead to carnage. The casualties caused by between 2,100 and 2,800 HAMAS/PIJ missiles landing in Gaza can be assumed to be considerable, but we have no way of knowing how considerable. (And, as we shall see, this is only the half of it.)

Likewise, all Gazans murdered by HAMAS when it “disappears” anti-Islamist activists or represses protests against its theft and politicised distribution of aid are added to the MOH tally as if they have been killed by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).

Two: there is no attempt by the MOH to disaggregate civilian and terrorist fatalities. The MOH  claims that the Palestinian death toll since October 2023 is up to 42,000, and all are listed simply as “martyrs” in the struggle against “Zionism”, with the heavy implication in the format and tone of releases under the MOH banner that this figure represents Palestinian civilian deaths, which even on its own terms it does not.

The IRGC way of war involves very careful management of the media narrative to erase its own presence, and make it appear Israel is warring against a civilian population. When Israel is fighting in IRGC-ruled territory, this is easy enough to do: every section of the society is controlled from the top, the press more tightly than most, so the orders go out not to broadcast videos or images of IRGC jihadists, and the impression is duly fostered that Israel is confronting no armed combatants. (The IRGC uses “media” officials for battlefield operations, as well as strategic messaging, hence the number of “journalists” HAMAS claims the IDF has targeted.) It is to reinforce this impression that Israel is conducting anti-civilian warfare that the “Gaza health ministry” lets stand the idea that its figures show only civilian casualties.

This IRGC propaganda campaign has been highly effective. So-called pro-Palestine activists all take the “health ministry” death toll as Gospel, of course, and routinely insinuate, if not directly state, that all of the fatalities are civilians, despite, again, that not being what the MOH statistics say. And this is not just the mobs on the streets. We hear this from the respectable media, most notoriously the BBC, and public intellectuals, as well as at the level of MPs and government officials in the West.⁷

Take an example from last week. Ta-Nehisi Coates has blessed us with a book of blinding insights about the conflict in the Holy Land after a ten-day visit, and to help us absorb his discoveries he has been doing the media rounds explaining why he would have participated in the 7 October pogrom and his resentment at Jewish podcasters who ask him about it. At an event on 9 October, Coates, citing the HAMAS MOH numbers, condemned the U.S. for supporting Israel in “wiping out” two percent of the Gazan population. There was no indication of doubt over the numbers’ reliability, neither the total nor the composition—that maybe half or more of the dead are from HAMAS’s killer brigades—and certainly no honest moral accounting about HAMAS’s evil strategy being responsible for the civilian victims.⁸ Coates’ clear imputation was that Israel has engaged in a senseless massacre of the innocents.

When the MOH has attempted to disaggregate the data, albeit only by age and sex, the MOH’s own explanation of how that was done suggested—as we shall see—that the data was so hopelessly polluted as to be useless, and pointed very strongly to the likelihood of fabrication.

To put it bluntly, then, before the “Gaza health ministry” said a single word after 7 October 2023, it was known to be a front for HAMAS, a terrorist organisation that has the extermination of Jews as the core of its ideology and practice, and to be a mechanism via which HAMAS released junk statistics designed for political warfare towards that end. It should, therefore, be no surprise that the MOH stats issued over the past year collapse when subjected to the barest scrutiny.

In an ideal world, the press and international institutions would have treated the MOH as what it is and consequently ignored it, leaving scrutiny of its output to specialists interested in terrorist propaganda. But we are where we are. So let us take a look at the myriad ways the MOH data does not stand up to examination.

METHODOLOGY AND MENDACITY

In January, Gabriel Epstein at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) published a paper that examined how HAMAS was coming up with the numbers published by its “health ministry”. Epstein is thorough, scrupulous, unpolemical, and erred on the side of charity in explaining the various discrepancies—which is why the paper was so devastating to the MOH’s credibility. Even with numerous allowances, a reader could conclude—and this one did—that no serious person should be using the HAMAS MOH as if it contained any reliable information at all.⁹

Do read Epstein’s whole paper, but just to give some highlights:

• The talking point that prior MOH figures for the total fatalities in previous rounds of fighting in Gaza—2008-09, 2012, 2014, and 2021—had lined up quite closely with Israeli findings, thus it should be believed in 2023-24, is dubious even that far (“quite” is doing a lot of work in this syllogism); is untrue in the sense that matters because Israel’s terrorist-to-civilian ratio each time was wildly different to what HAMAS’s MOH fed into the U.N. system via the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA); and 2023-24 is simply incomparable because the MOH/HAMAS previously had some supervision from the U.N.-NGO “Protection Cluster”, which broke down immediately this time, leaving a novel situation where the U.N. is using only HAMAS’s figures.

• A statement from the MOH on 10 November 2023 admitted it was no longer able to collect daily fatality totals. This was two weeks after Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza began, and as HAMAS operatives were driven out of the hospitals, the MOH—definitionally—lost its capacity to communicate with the hospitals and morgues. Thus ended any claim that casualty data in Gaza was being collected using an established methodology, the one known from prior conflicts when there was some ostensible international monitoring.

• In the month the MOH was offline, the Government Media Office (GMO)—HAMAS’ propaganda ministry—began putting out daily death totals, including a breakdown by sex and age. It will not surprise that the GMO figures purported to show a 70% rate of female and child fatalities, which got more extreme over time. OCHA dutifully relayed these stats, even after coyly noting at the end of December 2023 that the GMO’s “methodology is unknown”.

• The MOH started reporting again on 2 December 2023—the sole evidence-of-life of the Gaza MOH now is a Telegram channel that publishes exclusively in Arabic—and OCHA, no whit abashed, commenced blending the MOH casualty figures with those of the GMO, despite the two being contradictory.

• After its return to publishing daily totals on 2 December 2023, the MOH said it had kept working after 10 November by drawing data from “reliable media sources”.¹⁰ The majority of the fatalities (61%) the MOH recorded between 10 November and 31 December were ostensibly from these “media sources”, and the MOH inter alia made the extraordinary claim that, of the 6,629 media-derived fatalities recorded from northern Gaza in this period of heavy HAMAS-IDF fighting there, ten of them were adult males. The naïve among you might expect that the U.N. asked for some extraordinary evidence before OCHA recorded these figures. There was, of course, no such request, and the MOH made no pretence of providing any explanation of its “media sources” methodology. If the MOH is actually using media reports at all, this would almost certainly include Gazan media, which by definition excludes Palestinian military casualties, since HAMAS, in line with IRGC media-management techniques, will kill anybody who publishes photographs or footage of its fighters

• On 6 January 2024, the MOH announced that it was now collecting data on “missing” and dead Gazans in a Google document open up to the public, a third, even-more-obviously corruptible and unreliable source, alongside the old “Protection Cluster” and “media sources” methods.

• After early December 2023, the MOH stopped putting out a public breakdown of fatalities by age and sex, while continuing to claim it was sure 70+% were women and children—a proportion repeated by the United Nations, and endlessly recycled in the media, despite the publicly-available MOH figures showing a proportion below 60%. The most innocent explanation for this is a psychiatric one. More likely the explanation is ideological, just one more example of the media-NGO-U.N. disinformation complex, which has no aversion to relying on IRGC/HAMAS propaganda.

• Intermittently, the MOH—even when it was supposedly fully functioning before 10 November—would revive hundreds of adult males and add the corresponding number to the female and child fatalities. There was never an explanation for this, and the U.N. once again never asked for one. The U.N. simply updated its figures to reflect the new claims. (The GMO barely even pretended to be collecting data and just kept reducing the percentage of men among the fatalities.)

Just to underline: there was every reason to regard the HAMAS-derived casualty data as completely useless for anyone interested in the truth about Palestinian casualties in Gaza by January 2024 at the absolute latest if HAMAS is taken at its own word about how it gathered that data, with the three “methodologies” from the MOH and the entirely unexplained GMO figures, and it is a scandal that the United Nations has been laundering these statistics to give them “an air of credibility”, as Epstein puts it.

The reality of what went on in those first four months of the war is almost certainly much worse. Indeed, we know it was. The most concrete example is the Ahli Hospital: the MOH tally still includes 471 fatalities—90% or more of them imaginary—from that event, still blames Israel for them, and that figure remains in the U.N. data.

HAMAS/MOH could not know the precise number of Palestinian casualties. Compiling such a running tally in any warzone is impossible; things are too chaotic and fast-moving for that, all the more so in urban warfare.¹¹ The most we can ask for is confidence that the data is being compiled in good-faith to give a reasonable approximation. We have to be able to trust the data, and, without any means of checking each individual entry, we have to assess the process of compilation. If the compilers demonstrate a willingness to act on the best available information and correct errors quickly, we can have confidence in what they are doing. What we have in Gaza is the opposite. The MOH refusing to correct the record in such a high-profile case as Al-Ahli tells us that its casualty figures are not being compiled for factual purposes,¹² which means the whole dataset is unreliable, and the U.N. including this fake statistic reiterates that there is no additional analysis or verification in that dataset. The U.N. is simply relaying HAMAS’s numbers.

Epstein showed an abundance—arguably an excess—of restraint in not even raising the possibility that there had been fabrication in his January 2024 paper, despite it being pretty evident that the Occam’s razor answer to the multiple points where Epstein could make no sense of the provenance of the data was that HAMAS had invented it.

By late March 2024, Epstein had seen enough. In his meticulous and cautious way, Epstein documented the “significant omission or manipulation [of the MOH data] aimed at understating the number of men killed and overstating the number of children killed”, and while still willing to grant this benefit of the doubt, did finally raise the possibility of fabrication. By the end of March, the MOH was sourcing nearly 80% of its fatality data to media reports, and to this day we have not the faintest idea even of which media outlets the MOH is supposedly drawing from.¹³ Epstein notes that it is possible HAMAS’s MOH is “using the media reports methodology as a smokescreen for altering the data in support of the claim that 72% of those killed are women and children”. Epstein’s conclusion was that the MOH numbers “have lost any claim to validity”.¹⁴

STATISTICAL SHENANIGANS

Shortly before Epstein’s March 2024 piece, Abraham Wyner, a Professor of Statistics and Data Science at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, picked up the same point about the systematic distortions in the HAMAS/MOH data, but, crucially, he documented that this had occurred in the data before 10 November, i.e., when the MOH was supposedly working according to the “Protection Cluster” standards of prior Gaza wars.

“The numbers are not real”, Wyner wrote in Tablet: “the numbers are at a minimum grossly inaccurate and quite probably outright faked” in accordance with HAMAS’s political goal of minimising the number of military-age males killed and elevating the number of women and children fatalities.

Wyner documented:

1. The unusually linear increase in the MOH daily fatality count for Palestinians up to November 2023. There is “strikingly little variation”, Wyner writes. HAMAS appears to have settled on a figure of about 270, plus-or-minus 15% each day.

2. The lack of a relationship between the claimed women and children fatalities. On days where Israel caused a high number of incidental female deaths—an apartment block was struck in search of a HAMAS base underneath it, some terrible disaster with misidentification, etc.—a correspondingly high child fatality rate would be expected, and vice versa (low female and child rates should go together). But they do not.

3. The lack of a relationship between claimed female and adult male fatalities. The intensity of Israeli operations—especially in the air campaign phase in the first three weeks—should be reflected in the ebbs and flows for both sexes. “Not only is there not a positive correlation”, Wyner notes, “there is a strong negative correlation, which makes no sense at all”.

Wyner reinforces what Epstein noticed about the oddity of so many days—during the height of the fighting in northern Gaza—where virtually no adult males are reported among the slain, and the fact that these same days are when the highest totals for women killed are reported by the MOH.

Then there is the fact that HAMAS admitted in February 2024 that 6,000 of its fighters had been killed—about 20% of the MOH’s 30,000 claimed fatalities at that stage—combined with the persistent effort to keep the MOH’s women and children death toll at 70% of the total. HAMAS was thus left claiming that only 5% of the fatalities in Gaza were adult male non-combatants, in a population that is 25% men. “This is not possible unless Israel is somehow not killing noncombatant men, or else Hamas is claiming that almost all the men in Gaza are Hamas fighters,” Wyner points out.

Wyner sums up:

While the evidence is not dispositive, it is highly suggestive that a process unconnected or loosely connected to reality was used to report the [MOH] numbers. Most likely, the Hamas ministry settled on a daily total arbitrarily. … Then they assigned about 70% of the total to be women and children … Then they in-filled the number of men as set by the predetermined total. This explains all the data observed.

“The truth can’t yet be known and probably never will be”, Wyner says, but his interim conclusion is: “The total civilian casualty count is likely to be extremely overstated.”

Tom Simpson, Lewi Stone, and Gregory Rose, followed up with a report for Fathom Journal pointing out that the dogmatic MOH claim of 70% women and children fatalities was “contradicted by the statistics that the MoH itself provides in its own reports”, which any honest journalist “could easily have determined … using publicly available information”. The authors note that there are some crude individual “examples of disinformation” from HAMAS, such as the GMO resurrecting 1,000 men in the first week of December 2023, but the problem is systemic and not limited to the GMO, as shown by picking apart the streams of MOH data.

Up to 31 December 2023, the records claimed to be from hospitals and morgues (notionally the “Protection Cluster”-approved method) showed 58% of fatalities were women and children, which dropped to 42% in the first three months of 2024. In a population where those demographics make up 75% of the total, it suggests “a significant avoidance of civilian casualties on the part of the IDF”, the Fathom authors note. To maintain the non-adult-male death ratio at 70%, the “media sources” fatalities in October-December 2023 would have to be 92% women and children, which is “statistically absurd” and suggests an “impossible efficacy” from the IDF “to avoid killing men”. If this or anything like it were true, it would show up in the hospitals and morgues data, and it does not.

“The Ministry of Health’s figures are invalid”, the Fathom report concluded. “This is especially true of the unregistered ‘Media Sources’ deaths … It appears they are manipulated to contain an impossibly low number of males … Ultimately, the MoH published data is disinformation. It is impossible to consider these numbers true, reliable, or even feasible.”

HAMAS ADMITS (SOME) ERRORS

Perhaps stung by the wave of expert criticism, which was getting some wider attention, HAMAS decided in early April 2024 to try to recover credibility for its MOH by admitting there were problems with parts of the MOH casualty data, the idea being this showed that HAMAS was honest and, therefore, should not be questioned about the rest of the data—that is, most of it. It was not a very successful gambit.

For a start, the very process of making this admission raised more questions. The MOH Telegram channel announced on 3 April that 12,263 of its records for Palestinian fatalities out of 33,091 (37%) were “incomplete”, without further defining that term. Then, on 6 April, another Telegram message said 11,371 records (34%) were “incomplete”, now defined as meaning that one or more of the key fields—identity number, full name, sex, date of birth, or date of death—were missing. How and why the number of “incomplete” records reduced by 900 in three days, we do not know.

HAMAS was essentially reclassifying the records gathered from its unexplained “media sources” as “incomplete”, but there was another discrepancy here because HAMAS had admitted on 31 March that 15,070 (46%) records were from media reports. But grant HAMAS the whole thing—the random reduction of the “incomplete” records by 900 and the implicit claim that nearly 4,000 “complete” or “identified” records derived from the media. By early April 2024, just sticking to HAMAS’s account, at least one-third the death toll reported by the MOH was to be disregarded.

HAMAS would try to cover this up soon afterwards, rebranding “incomplete” records as “unidentified”—the idea being that an individual death was certain, they just did not know who it was—but this is simply false: the “unidentified” records were produced using “media sources”, if they have a source at all; there is no body and no reliable evidence the fatality occurred.¹⁵

HAMAS tried to buttress its 6 April claim that two-thirds of the data was sound by releasing a list of 21,323 “identified fatalities”. HAMAS first released such a list in October 2023, and errors were swiftly identified.¹⁶ It did not take more than a cursory look at the April list for Mark Zlochin to identify serious problems again: 500 duplicates, 400 without any ID numbers, more than 2,000 with invalid ID numbers, huge numbers with suspicious birth dates (e.g., the first of the month), internal confusion over the 900 names added after 3 April (even the number was unclear), 2,500 dubious self-reports via telephone or the Google document, plus the continuing contradiction between MOH and GMO data, and an absurd claimed ratio of adult male to female and child fatalities.

Even one inveterate defender of the HAMAS/MOH figures noted that the “trend toward declining data quality has continued”, with 15% (over 3,000) records being unusable, and grudgingly conceded that the claim 70% of the fatalities were women and children was “increasingly untenable”: the 18,000 or so “complete” records, taken at their own face value, showed a proportion of 53%.

UNITED NATIONS “REVISIONS”

The mounting problems with the HAMAS figures were so blatant by May 2024 that the United Nations realised something was afoot.

On 6 May, OCHA reported 34,735 people had been killed in Gaza, 9,500 of them women and over 14,500 children, thus 24,000 non-adult-males, the traditional HAMAS proportion of roughly 70%.

On 8 May, OCHA, while keeping roughly the same total fatality count, recorded 12,756 non-adult males—4,959 women and 7,797 children—among the dead, a proportion of 36.5%, about half of the prior claim.

The United Nations’ most avid supporters would struggle to believe the organisation is capable of bringing 12,000 people back from the dead, so what happened here?

The U.N.’s answer was that this was a routine adjustment. When questioned specifically about the head of UNICEF, a U.N. agency, explicitly claiming in March that “more than 13,000 children” had been killed in Gaza, the U.N. waffled about the “fog of war”, suddenly wanted everyone to know it is “difficult to come up with numbers” (presumably meaning accurate numbers; the U.N. has proven quite capable of “com[ing] up with numbers”), and congratulated itself for making “revisions” after “crosscheck[ing]” its “sources on the ground”. Except there was no crosschecking. The U.N. was relying solely on HAMAS all the way along—and still is.

In March, the U.N./OCHA had—without any announcement or explanation—recommenced recording disaggregated sex data about Gaza fatalities from the GMO, the HAMAS propaganda ministry. In the two months afterwards, OCHA sneakily disguised what it was doing, for a brief time by citing the U.N. Women agency—which circularly cited OCHA, when both were using the GMO—and subsequently by falsely citing the MOH. What happened on 8 May was OCHA genuinely switched back to the MOH claims for women and children fatalities “for the first time in five months”.

Even on the best reading, this still involves the U.N. simply relaying HAMAS claims, something it has never officially done before—as mentioned, in prior Gaza wars, the “Protection Cluster” theoretically vetted HAMAS figures that went into the OCHA count—and the severe problems with the MOH’s definition of “identified” casualties remains. But at least the U.N. had ceased relying on the GMO and was back to using the less-overtly fabricated HAMAS figures, right? Well, no.

The U.N.’s new total for fatalities, 34,844, included 24,686 “identified” Gazans as defined by the MOH, which released another casualty list on 5 May, that was, as Salo Aizenberg explained, as problematic as all the others: 4,000 transparently false records (duplicates, missing or fake IDs), the fatality count for minors corrupted by the inclusion of HAMAS’s child soldiers, Gazans killed by HAMAS counted as if the IDF was responsible, and so on.

The 10,158 “unidentified” fatalities included by OCHA were said to be “missing or under the rubble”, a concession on its own terms that there is no proof these people are dead, and the claim is sourced to the GMO. And it gets worse. That figure was of then-recent vintage, as David Adesnik pointed out. Between 28 April and 3 May, the GMO added 3,000 people to this “unidentified” tally, and if you are wondering why, you will continue to wonder. The GMO never said and the U.N. never asked. The MOH figure for those reported “missing” is 3,700. While that is hardly reliable either, the key thing to notice is the U.N. including flagrantly incompatible figures without any explanation or even acknowledgment of the fact.

Contrary to the U.N. assertions, this is all highly irregular. Usually, when the U.N. loses access to independent casualty data in an active warzone, it ceases reporting, rather than legitimising the claims of one of the combatants. Such was the case in Syria in 2014, and where the U.N. has never had reliable access, as in Ethiopia and Sudan, it has never attempted comprehensive casualty reporting. For reasons one cannot possibly guess at, the U.N. has abandoned its norms over Gaza, and doubled down when questioned about its wholly unique approach. Farhan Haq, Deputy Spokesman for the U.N. Secretary-General, said on 13 May, “the [HAMAS] Ministry of Health … figures have proven to be generally accurate”, and the next day, the World Health Organisation (WHO), a U.N. agency, more emphatically said there was “nothing wrong with the data” [italics added].

ACTIVIST TRY TO OUT-BID HAMAS

The U.N. situation was so absurd that prestige outlets of the mainstream press were finally forced to take an interest. An activist-generated backlash duly ensued to remind journalists that questioning anti-Israel narratives comes with a price.¹⁷ And in July, the “pro-Palestinian” activists tried to get the show back on the road with a letter from three academics in the Lancet, a journal where the peer-reviewed Science has been increasingly put in the shade of political activism over the last thirty years under the stewardship of editor-in-chief Richard Horton.¹⁸

The Lancet letter-writers, at least one of whom overtly supports anti-Jewish violence, were not content with the 37,396 deaths HAMAS was claiming by that time. Using data from other conflicts that allegedly showed that a “conservative estimate” was that there were “four indirect deaths per one direct death”, the authors said: “it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict”, or nearly 8% of the Gazan population.

Francesca Albanese, one of the “Special Rapporteurs” at the U.N. and an outstandingly vicious antisemite even in that competitive environment, was quick to endorse the Lancet letter, as was Wikipedia on its delightfully neutral “Gaza genocide” page, and the predictable media outlets, like The Guardian and Al-Jazeera, circulated it.

The Lancet had hosted previous activism disguised as analysis in defence of HAMAS’s agitprop,¹⁹ but the attempt to present an arbitrary five-fold increase of the already unreliable Gaza casualty figures as Science was so silly that engaging it risks dignifying it. A critique from a statistician who is no friend of Israel’s—he agreed with the Lancet authors’ political demand for a ceasefire that spared HAMAS—barely knew where to start: since the July letter is ambiguous whether its death toll “is a projection for the future or is meant to be something that has already happened”, it is difficult to assess what is actually being claimed, and to the extent the letter’s “methodology” is apparent it “lacks rigour”.

HAMAS’S DECEPTION UNCOVERED?

Ohad Hamu, a well-known Israeli journalist, said on Channel 12 on 6 October 2024 that a “Palestinian source … in constant contact with the HAMAS leadership abroad” had told him that HAMAS internally speaks of 80% of the 41,000-plus MOH-claimed fatalities in Gaza being “HAMAS operatives and their family members”.

What to make of this? Not much, is the short answer.

Some made comparisons with the “Great March of Return” in 2018. HAMAS orchestrated attacks on the Israeli border fence with Gaza, and on 14 May 2018 sixty people were killed to prevent them storming into Israel. It was claimed the slain were civilians. At face value, this was a terrorist provocation, designed to get civilians killed to score political points, of a kind the IRGC has been using since before it took over Iran.²⁰ This did not stop the media and “human rights” groups going along with HAMAS’s game, of course. Then it turned out, as revealed by senior HAMAS official Salah al-Bardawil, that HAMAS was not only ultimately responsible: at least fifty of the dead (83%) were HAMAS members.

One can see what people meant, and the 2018 events are certainly a reminder of the deceptiveness of HAMAS and its cynical cruelty towards Palestinian civilians, but the two cases are not alike.

For a start, we do not know if Hamu’s source is even a member of HAMAS, unlike Al-Bardawil, and the statement being anonymous and private is also different, and should incline us to give it less credibility. Furthermore, Hamu says the source has contact with “the HAMAS leadership abroad”, presumably meaning those in Qatar, which should inherently add to our scepticism since they are so far removed from the battlefield. But it would not actually matter if Hamu’s source was in the Strip: the Doha-based HAMAS leaders are in contact with the IRGC’s man on the spot, Yahya Sinwar, and there is no reason to think he is—or could be—much better informed about the death toll than anybody else.

Hamu’s reporting is potentially interesting, if verified, as a revelation about what HAMAS’s leaders believe. It has no bearing on the factual questions of the scale and identity of the casualties in Gaza.

CONCLUSION

There is a temptation to use the HAMAS numbers for Palestinian casualties in Gaza because we have no others. The State Department has openly said this is the reason it and others in the U.S. government have quoted these figures,²¹ while simultaneously admitting “we don’t have any way of verifying those figures” and being unable to “say [they are] accurate with any degree of certainty”. Claiming to know more than you do, and disseminating this fake knowledge, is the definition of disinformation: it is an appalling habit in inter-personal relations and when practiced at a governmental level it can have disastrous consequences. Another of the State Department’s defences for relying on the HAMAS figures was that “the U.N. relies on them”, but that only restates the problem: the U.N. should not be relying on them, and it is a scandal that they do.

The explanation given by the HAMAS “health ministry” itself of its methodology should have stopped anybody searching in good-faith for information about fatalities in Gaza using the MOH/U.N. data no later than January 2024. As set out in detail above, studies in the months since have shown that HAMAS’s data does not suffer from one or two defects in the collection process that could be corrected going forward and allowed for in the meantime to give us a rough estimate of the Palestinian death toll in Gaza. The problem is that the data does not reflect patterns that would be expected of a real dataset: it makes no statistical sense, neither in its particulars nor its trendlines, and it is perfectly obvious why that is. HAMAS’s casualty figures are not designed to make factual sense: their purpose is political warfare and that is what determines their formulation—and uncritical dissemination by the United Nations.

The “pro-Palestinian” activists using the HAMAS casualty figures are trying to take a short-cut in a political argument, but this is needless, as well as disreputable. The scientistic habit of generating and accepting “facts” that support moral-political positions, and rejecting information deemed unfavourable to the cause, should be set aside. An argument that can only be upheld by falsehoods is not a strong one. More to the point, it is not as if the casualty stats are the determinant of activist views. Just be honest and make the political argument for a ceasefire or the immorality of Israel’s rules-of-engagement—positions that would have been held regardless of the statements from HAMAS’s MOH.

Activists’ selectivity, distortion, and invention of facts is to be expected by the nature of what they do. The more serious problem is with those self-presenting as committed to objectivity, above all journalists, whose ostensible job is the discovery of the truth. There is very little excuse for such people to be using the HAMAS MOH figures at this late date. Even the most incurious among them must have an inkling that the figures are terrorist propaganda by now. It might be unsatisfying to say we simply do not know the Palestinian death toll in Gaza, but reality stands whether we like it or not, and we should judge harshly—and suspect the motives—of anyone who claims to know what they cannot.

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FOOTNOTES

1. By the precedent established in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) ruling on Srebrenica, the Iran/HAMAS massacre in Israel on 7 October 2023 is a self-evident act of genocide.

2. Henryk Broder once remarked, “The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz”. It is not only the Germans. The effort to absolve Europe of guilt by portraying Jews as equivalent to, if not worse than, the Nazis began almost as soon as the Nuremberg rulings were in and Israel was recreated. As Nazism and its doctrines, above all racism, became the primary sins in the West in the decades after 1945, antisemitism was reformulated, significantly under the influence of the Soviets’ “anti-Zionism” campaign in the 1970s. Previously, the Jews’ cosmic crime in Christendom had been the murder of God and (after the nineteenth century) polluting the race. In the modern era, Jews are still held to be guilty of the gravest crimes (post)Christian society can conceive of, but now that means Jews have to be portrayed as the Nazis of our time, the perpetrators of racist genocide. The Arab world took a little time to catch up: well into the 1950s, “Nazi” was not an insult but something of a compliment in Arab societies. Soviet infiltration and contact with Western moral-political mores has amended this, at least at the lexicographical level. Most Arab spokesman are now quite careful in public to refer to their antagonists as “Zionists”, rather than Jews, and to construct their arguments based on the premise that copying what Hitler did (as they say “Zionists” are) is a bad thing.

3. The advent of smartphones has meant Westerners can experience a foreign war like Gaza in a way—minute-by-minute, in excruciating detail—that is wholly new. Few Westerners have much understanding of inter-personal violence, and fewer still any personal experience of war. Added to that are social changes in recent decades have drastically reduced the Western tolerance for even military casualties. The combination of these elements leaves many Westerners unable to cope with the fact that war is not a crime (or is “lawful but awful”, as some put it). This is not limited to the general public. It affects ostensible professionals in “human rights” groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch: their output misrepresenting “international humanitarian law” to provide anti-Israel talking points is not only wilful political activism; part of it is their employees seeing scenes in Gaza or Lebanon, having the understandable emotional reaction that “this is horrible”, and working backwards from that to say it must be “illegal”.

4. For the sake of making this article easier to read, and to avoid the annoyance of referring to the “health ministry” in scare quotes every time, I am going to refer to it by the MOH acronym, but just to reiterate what is in the body of the article. My own view is that the MOH does not exist in the sense that those using the casualty figures put out under its name believe: to the extent there is a physical institutional entity one could call a “ministry”, it is controlled top to bottom by HAMAS, and its publicity mechanisms—any spokesmen it wheels out and the Telegram channel—are in the hands of HAMAS’s propaganda apparatus.

5. The same issue of the press relaying casualty figures from the IRGC as if they are factual is already beginning in Lebanon.

6. Around the time of the 2014 flare-up in Gaza, outlets as mainstream as Time Magazine, U.S. News and World Report, and even the BBC published articles on HAMAS controlling the MOH and manipulating the casualty figures for political purposes. In January 2009, immediately after the first Israel-HAMAS war, a Gazan doctor at Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest in the Strip, speaking anonymously for fear of his life, confessed that HAMAS had exaggerated both the total fatality figures and the percentage of civilian deaths, the latter of which, he said, were minimal.

As early as November 2007, five months after the HAMAS coup in Gaza, the British Medical Journal, as part of research on the situation for medical staff in the Strip, spoke plainly of “the health ministry of the Hamas government”. In February 2009, the “Palestinian Authority”—the front for the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO)—itself complained about HAMAS operating militarily out of hospitals in the then-recent round of fighting in Gaza, and using the hospitals to imprison and torture dissidents. In 2014, a journalist at The Washington Post—the most unapologetically activist major outlet at this moment—reported that he had seen with his own eyes HAMAS using Gaza’s hospitals to wage war against Israel.

Again, this was not new information even fifteen years ago. It is a common practice for the IRGC, undercover as medical personnel (particularly the Red Crescent), to use hospitals as command-and-control centres and weapons stores, and to use ambulances to transport weapons and jihadists around battlefields. This was seen in Iraq and Lebanon in the 2000s, and in Bosnia in the 1990s, where the IRGC used the Red Crescent apparatus not only for the logistics of its own jihadists, but to help Al-Qaeda. Correspondingly, the Islamic Revolution model in Gaza has seen the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, which is a significant nominal source of the MOH fatality data, serially accused of involvement in HAMAS’s terrorism, including the October pogrom.

7. A particularly egregious case has been Ireland, which is for historical reasons very hostile to Israel and very sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, including in its most overtly murderous forms. Last month, after MOSSAD blew up the pagers it had created and gotten into Hizballah’s possession, Ireland’s Foreign Minister, Micheál Martin, responded to what is possibly the most targeted mass-counter-terrorism operation in history by condemning Israel’s “wanton disregard” for civilian life. There is no reasoning with an outlook of this kind.

8. Those who object that the claim of a 1:1 civilian-to-combatant ratio for the dead in Gaza comes from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might be approaching the point of realisation about the problems in using the casualty figures from HAMAS.

9. The March 2024 Fathom Journal analysis raised the possibility of a slight exception: the MOH figures reflect the trendline in the very broadest terms, namely the radical reduction in Palestinian casualties in the first three months of 2024 as against the last three months of 2023. But as the authors note, the reduction in the intensity and tempo of Israel’s operations in Gaza—as well as the transition from the air to the ground phase, and the IDF’s increasing wariness (for political reasons) to strike at terrorist targets who flee into crowded civilian zones—were obvious to anyone who can read a newspaper. It did not need the MOH’s “absurd and fabricated propaganda statistics”.

10. Epstein has pointed out that using press reports to gather fatality data about a conflict, even at the U.N. level, is not inherently illegitimate, nor is it that unusual. The distinction is that media sources in other conflicts are used retrospectively, to piece together the fatalities, usually for a single event, and the sources are made crystal clear. There is no case other than Gaza of media reports, even identifiable ones, being used in the U.N. system as part of the calculation of a real-time death toll.

11. An overarching fact that should induce extreme scepticism about real-time casualty claims is that the death tolls for most wars—and not just recent ones—are well-known to be essentially mythical. The casualty counts were formed at the time by political actors in or around the conflicts, and these numbers are repeated so often, contemporaneously and in the years afterwards, by State officials, policymakers, the press, and academia, that they acquire a canonical status as something “everybody knows”—without anybody thinking it necessary to check the evidence. For an overview of this phenomenon, see: Peter Andreas and Kelly M. Greenhill [eds.] (2010), Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts: The Politics of Numbers in Global Crime and Conflict.

12. An example: on 10 August 2024, HAMAS’s MOH claimed an Israeli strike on the Taba’een school in Gaza City had killed nearly 100 civilians during morning prayers, a story that was quickly broadcast around the world. The IDF swiftly documented that the target of the strike was Ashraf Juda, the commander of PIJ’s Central Camps Brigade, and while Juda’s fate was not certain, nineteen named terrorists had been killed. The MOH did quietly revise itself hours later, saying forty people—as ever, it made no distinction between civilians and terrorists—had been killed in three separate Israeli airstrikes, but the original story of Israel carrying out a huge anti-civilian “massacre” had a life of its own by then, which was clearly the point.

Similarly, the conduct of the “health ministry”—and the international media, NGOs, and United Nations—when Israel rescued four hostages from Nuseirat on 8 June was such as to leave the impression “that HAMAS had been quite responsibly holding the Israeli hostages and then the IDF had … appeared from nowhere to carry out a racist rampage against innocent Arabs in a ‘refugee camp’,” killing 200 people. That total is likely heavily inflated, and some large number of the dead were probably HAMAS fighters, who had reacted to the Israeli rescue operation by trying to murder the hostages. But once again, we can never be sure because the MOH was not just mistaken in its efforts to record the facts of the situation; it was waging political warfare. The MOH’s intention over Nuseirat was to provoke international outrage at Israel to suppress what would otherwise have been a natural human sympathy with a State recovering its hostages, and a news cycle focused on the evils of the terrorist group that had taken them.

13. As David Adesnik summarised in early April: “Of nearly 11,000 fatalities reported between Jan. 1 and March 31, the ministry derived 77.7% from media reports. Adult males account for only 9% of fatalities attributed to the news, even though Gaza’s sex ratio is close to even and more than half its residents are adults.”

14. Reiterating the point a month later, in late April 2024, Epstein said: “I don’t think there’s even a way to use [the HAMAS/MOH casualty figures] as a rough guide anymore.”

15. This fact is to be borne in mind when looking at HAMAS’s most recent list of “identified” fatalities in Gaza from the MOH, released on 17 September, purporting to name 34,344 of the dead—including 11,355 children, 6,297 women, and 2,955 old people—out of a total of 41,957. Thus, HAMAS is now claiming that “unidentified” fatalities account for 7,613 (18%) of the total. Without checking the names for duplicates, missing IDs, and the other problems that have shown up on every other list, the clear purpose of this list is to reduce the proportion of “unidentified” fatalities—those added to the tally ostensibly from “media sources”, which had previously accounted for one-third of the fatalities, highly disproportionately women and children—and thereby diminish the size of a portion of the data that is very dubious even if HAMAS is to be believed about how it was collected.

It was most amusing to see the usual suspects praise HAMAS’s “efforts” in getting the “unidentified” number down: the sudden “correction” of thousands of ID numbers and “identification” of thousands of the previously nameless, after months of sustained criticism, is a “marked improvement” to such minds, instead of a red flag.

(There are other problems visible before any deep analysis of the individual records. First, the inclusion of the elderly category alongside women and children bumps up the non-military-aged-male, i.e. presumable civilian, death toll from about 51% to a suspiciously exact 60%. Second, these three categories, on their own terms, do not in fact signify only civilian deaths. The MOH does not distinguish terrorists and civilians; HAMAS does use women in various roles; and HAMAS makes extensive use of child soldiers, as do all IRGC units—on a scale so horrifying that the “human rights” groups sometimes complain about it.)

16. On 26 October 2023—a day after President Joe Biden said he had “no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using” (and a day before Israel’s ground invasion, as it transpired)—HAMAS, under the MOH flag, released “an apparently detailed list of what the document (and OCHA) said was 7,028 names of slain Gazans. But it did not add up—literally. The number given on the front page conflicted with three separate graphs in the report”. There were problems with duplicates and games being played with IDs—all the issues that have become so much worse in the year since.

17. Graeme Wood’s 17 May article at The Atlantic, “The UN’s Gaza Statistics Make No Sense”, was to be the target of a social media-generated firestorm by activists who, ignoring the unarguable things he said about the nonsensical mess the U.N. had got itself into by using HAMAS’s casualty data, selected a quote about the realities of war, expressing sentiments of the “lawful but awful” kind, and pretended it was outrageous.

The Associated Press produced a pair of reports on 7 June acknowledging that many fewer women and children had been killed in Gaza than the HAMAS had been claiming. The activist response was more muted because the AP did its best to bury the implications by suggesting the change was recent—related to changes in IDF tactics—and continued to treat the “health ministry” as if it was “generally reliable”, quoting activist “experts” like Omar Shakir of Human Rights Watch to this effect. Indeed, the AP relied on the MOH for its analysis, noting that while the MOH had long claimed 70% or more of the fatalities were women and children, the “underlying [MOH] data clearly showed the percentage was well below that”. However, instead of concluding this reflected a problem with the MOH’s honesty, the AP handed over to activists who said that any problems with the MOH were caused by Israel’s pressure on the institution and unless Israel produces casualty numbers we have to believe the MOH, an amusing if cynical demand, since there is no chance the “human rights” activists or the AP would accept Israeli estimates of the Palestinian casualties in Gaza.

18. While The Lancet tends to break into the public conversation more for its political than scientific output these days, that is not to say the Science has not been attention-getting during Richard Horton’s tenure at the helm. For example, in 1998, The Lancet published the paper by Andrew Wakefield and his co-authors that linked the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine with autism in children, setting off a panic that has caused a long-term reduction in vaccination rates. Wakefield was a conscious fraudster who had a financial interest in discrediting the combined MMR vaccine. In 2008, The Lancet launched the career of Paolo Macchiarini, an Italian surgeon who claimed to have found a way to transplant tracheas without the body rejecting them, and in 2011 the magazine published Macchiarini again on the “progress” he was making. Surgical transplants were performed on five people, including a toddler, in what amounted to human experiments since Macchiarini had falsified the evidence showing these transplants worked. Four of them died; the fifth survived because the synthetic trachea was removed.

It would be unfair to suggest that these disasters occurred because Horton’s focus on political matters had led to a neglect of his Science remit. Horton remained quite engaged on the Science side. Horton tenaciously defended Wakefield, whose “findings” were challenged almost immediately, and The Lancet only retracted the fake MMR-autism paper in 2010. After doubts were raised about Macchiarini in 2014, The Lancet was, if anything, even more active in supporting him. This went on for years. Even after Macchiarini was removed from his academic positions in 2016, Horton was warning against a rush to judgment. Macchiarini was ultimately imprisoned after a lengthy prosecution, and in 2018 The Lancet finally retracted his papers.

See: Stuart Ritchie (2020), Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype in Science, pp. 48-52, 76-79.

19. In early January 2024, a group of researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health had a letter published in the Lancet informing one and all: “we compared the Gaza MoH’s mortality reports with a separate source of mortality reporting and found no evidence of inflated rates”. The problem was that the comparison group chosen was the staff of United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Of 12,000 UNRWA staff, about 10% are direct members of a terrorist organisation and half have close relatives who are terrorists. The evidence that about a dozen UNRWA staff were personally involved in the 7 October pogrom has been available since shortly after it happened, and in August 2024 UNRWA admitted as much, though the U.N. refused to even fire them, never mind have them prosecuted. This is by way of saying that the UNRWA death toll of 150 by January 2024 (it is currently over 220) is not a control group. UNRWA is an extension of HAMAS for all practical purposes, and the UNRWA fatalities, in total and when disaggregated by sex, tell that story.

20. Terrorists deliberately getting “their own” civilians killed for political warfare purposes against the State they are targeting for destruction is a tried and trusted tactic. It was particularly effective during Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1978-79. Islamists killed 400 people by burning down the Cinema Rex in Abadan on 19 August 1978, and in the hysterical atmosphere of the time Khomeini was believed by many when he claimed SAVAK, the Shah’s political police, were responsible. The more exact analogy with what IRGC/HAMAS did at the Israel-Gaza border in 2018 is the infamous disaster in Jaleh Square in Tehran on 8 September 1978 (“Black Friday”).

As presented to the world, the Shah’s security forces had wantonly slaughtered 3,000 or 4,000 civilians in Jaleh Square who were protesting for freedom. The impact of the event was immense, bringing the Iranian Revolution—ongoing for eight months at this point—to international attention, and convincing the Shah to call it quits; he would not occupy a bloodied throne. The Shah left Iran in January 1979 and Khomeini was swept to power the next month in an Islamist-Communist coup.

The new Islamic Republic eventually quietly admitted that 64 people had perished in the thirty seconds of chaos in Jaleh Square and 24 had died in clashes in the surrounding area on the same day, which pointed to the second discovery. Once the records of the Shah’s government were opened, it turned out a significant number of State troops had been killed by gunmen firing either from high windows or the crowd or both, and this is what had caused the stampede that left the Iranian soldiers in the Square no choice but to fire into the crowd. The evidence accumulated in the years points to foreign Palestinian terrorists from the PLO, which Khomeini had contracted to train the nascent IRGC, as the probable gunmen, but it is possible the gunmen were operatives from the Islamist-Marxist Mojahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK) cult that Khomeini had deputised as the terrorist wing of the Revolution. The MEK had been trained by the Soviet Union’s PLO-staffed global terrorism apparatus.

See: Darioush Bayandor (2019), The Shah, the Islamic Revolution, and the United States, p. 214-15; Gholam Reza Afkhami (2009), The Life and Times of the Shah, pp. 465-66, 665; and, Andrew Scott Cooper (2016), The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran, pp. 399-400.

21. In Congressional testimony on 29 February 2024, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was asked how many Palestinian women and children had been killed by Israel’s operations in Gaza, and Austin replied: “It is over 25,000”. And President Joe Biden, in his 7 March 2024 State of the Union address, said: “This war has taken a greater toll on innocent civilians than all previous wars in Gaza combined. More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed—most of whom are not HAMAS. Thousands and thousands of innocents—women and children.” These are the two most high-profile citations of HAMAS’s casualty numbers by U.S. government officials, and the fact they occurred is all the more remarkable because Biden personally said the numbers could not be relied upon months earlier, on 25 October 2023.