New research shows that Hamas has quietly dropped thousands of deaths from its Gaza war casualty figures.
Salo Aizenberg, from the US-based non-profit organisation Honest Reporting, said that Hamas’s March 2025 casualty update had removed thousands of people it previously listed as having been killed last year.
“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. These “deaths” never happened. The numbers were falsified – again,” Mr Aizenberg wrote.
[...]
A report by the
Henry Jackson Society in December said that the number of civilians killed in the
Gaza conflict had probably been inflated by Hamas in order to portray Israel as deliberately targeting innocent people.
[...]
“The demographics are the most important thing in all this. We’ve heard the claims that about 70 per cent of the deaths are women and children, and these lists, especially the most recent, show that’s complete nonsense,” he said.
About 72 per cent of fatalities aged 13-55 are men, which is the rough age range of Hamas combatants, Mr Fox said. “We know that Hamas uses child soldiers, and these statistics show clearly that Israel is targeting fighting-aged men.”
In previous conflicts, Hamas figures have often been corroborated by external organisations, Mr Fox said.
The Henry Jackson Society’s December report said: “The ministry of health, operating under Hamas, has systematically inflated the death toll by failing to distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths, over-reporting fatalities among women and children and even including individuals who died before the conflict began.
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