The War on Truth Against Israel (Part 5)

Disputable casualty figures published by Hamas

We have been providing a summary of an in-depth and academic report investigating the war between Hamas and Israel, which specifically focuses on the ubiquitous allegations of ‘genocide’ committed by Israel against the Gazan population. ‘Debunking the Genocide Allegations: A Re-examination of the Israel-Hamas War from October 7, 2023 to June 1, 2025,’, compiled by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (B-SCSS) is a report little publicised by mainstream media.

Part One debunks the ‘Mass Starvation’ allegations. Part Two lays bare the complexities and dangers of fighting in an urban environment. Part Three focuses on refuting the claims of widespread massacre and deliberate killing, while Part Four investigates the allegations of indiscriminate bombing on Gaza.

The current article turns its attention to the casualty figures published by Hamas which have been widely quoted in the media.

Humanitarian bias

As well as a critical examination, the authors of the B-SCSS report consider and compare some of the issues with calculating civilian deaths in other situations. This is to highlight what they call the ‘humanitarian bias’. 

Essentially, they state; “The methodologies employed by human rights organizations and UN agencies are highly problematic. Unlike intelligence agencies, which can deploy operatives and gather data even within closed, insulated societies or hostile factions, human rights organizations are largely limited to relying on testimonies from individual witnesses, publicly reported data, and cooperation with local governments, hoping that these sources remain politically neutral.”

The methodologies employed by human rights organizations and UN agencies are highly problematic.

One key case study that they highlight (in addition to several that look at previous conflicts between Israel and Palestinian groups) is one that occurred three decades ago, when UN agencies and human rights organisations, together with academic researchers and medical experts, concluded that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children died during the American sanctions of the 1990s, based on reports from the Iraqi health ministry. This was based on a survey conducted by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization that indicated a five-fold increase in infant mortality – where, crucially, the interviewers conducting the survey were recruited by the Iraqi health ministry. 

This survey was then used as a primary source and base for subsequent studies – suggesting more than half a million additional child deaths. The genocide accusation then began to be used by a number of people. Intense worldwide political pressure emanating from this culminated in the removal of sanctions – allowing Saddam Hussein to further increase his grip on the population. 

However, following the removal of Saddam Hussein in 2003, and the change in regime, the data was proved to be entirely false. There had been a brief spike in child mortality following the invasion of Kuwait, and the subsequent repression of Kurdish and Shia uprisings, but this had not continued. Yet the public admission of the error by one of the researchers received minimal media attention or academic citation. The original flawed data are indeed still used as a case against the use of sanctions.

The report calls this phenomenon ‘humanitarian bias’, where aid organisations “believe alarmist reports from parties to a conflict, viewing them as urgent calls to prevent imminent disaster. Attempts to challenge this information with factual, quantitative evidence are frequently met with moral outrage, as they are perceived as dismissing the suffering of victims.”

As the report’s authors point out, this humanitarian bias has been evident in the war between Israel and Gaza. The report considers numerous areas in which it is clear that erroneous data have emerged from Gaza. 

The Gaza Ministry of Health

The Gaza Ministry of Health (GMOH) has been the main source for reporting casualty figures. It is under direct instructions from the Interior Ministry to call everyone who is killed an ‘innocent citizen’, not to mention the circumstances of the death, and not to discuss their role in the military.

The GMOH has been caught out in blatant lying, following its claim that 471 people had been killed in an Israeli attack on a hospital, when it was later confirmed that it was a rocket launched by Palestinian Islamic Jihad that exploded in the hospital’s car park. Casualty data was manipulated that day to give that number – a day when there seemed to be surprisingly few casualties elsewhere, considering the ongoing fighting. The GMOH did not correct its data, even when conclusively proved to be false. 

Initially, claims were made that 70% of casualties were women and children – and this statistic has frequently been quoted to prove a ‘genocide’. However, percentages given of women and children killed decreased once the GMOH were required to give names and ID numbers of each person in their figures. 

However, since then, the GMOH’s tallies have often been augmented with figures from the Gaza Media Office, supposedly basing additional death figures on ‘reliable media reports’. Figures quoted in the report show significant gender changes in the records, with initial reports showing, for example, men accounting for 52% of fatalities between December 11, 2023, and March 23, 2024, but for the same period, 14,602 deaths were then added using these ‘reliable media reports’, of which only 8% were men. As the report states, “This phenomenon is statistically illogical unless those ‘reliable reports’ were deliberately created to maintain the impression that a high proportion of war victims are women and children” – effectively to maintain an illusion that the IDF were targeting women and children to conduct ‘genocide’.

Furthermore, the report remarks that “research has clearly pointed to media manipulation by channels and websites controlled by Hamas or associated with it—an ecosystem of ‘reliable information sources’ that refer to each other within a closed loop. This system includes a long list of websites and social media accounts that supposedly are not affiliated with Hamas, and are even perceived as private or anti-establishment, but which in reality operate under its guidance or inspiration, all to create a false appearance of credibility.”

Following the above discrepancies, the UN decided, in May 2024, to disregard the Gaza Media data, only considering GMOH lists containing ID and name-verified casualties. Overnight, the cumulative number of identified women and children dropped from 69% to 52%. Soon after, however, the proportion changed once again, suggesting that the GMOH found a different way to manipulate the data. 

...the frequently cited claim that 70% of war casualties are women and children is incorrect, even according to the GMOH’s own data – and was false from the very beginning of the war.

On various occasions, the daily total deaths have been increased retrospectively; significantly, with the increase representing a very high percentage of children. For example, on December 5, 2023, the Ministry of Health reported 16,248 dead in total (since the beginning of the war), up from 15,207 three days earlier—an increase of 1,041. However, 1,353 of the new deaths were women and children (628 women and 725 children), a figure that significantly exceeds the overall increase.
The report’s detailed statistical analysis shows that the frequently cited claim that 70% of war casualties are women and children is incorrect, even according to the GMOH’s own data – and was false from the very beginning of the war.

Other questionable statistics

Curiously, as well as questionable numbers being added retrospectively, around six thousand were removed from the lists of the dead – notably including known Hamas combatants, medical personnel known to be Hamas operatives, and close relatives of key Hamas leaders. “It appears that these removals aimed to preserve a narrative of Israel targeting journalists and medical personnel unrelated to Hamas.”

Even individuals known to have died from natural causes were included in the lists – including Gazans who had died in Israel while being treated for cancer. Significantly, a retroactive correction of these lists removing 1,800 deaths known to be of natural causes only took place after their presence was noticed by others. 
One different study which claimed a higher death rate than the GMOH was a family study by Spagat – the report’s authors go into detail about serious questions that arise from this study – not least that the reported number of family members in prison vastly exceeded the number held by the IDF at the time, and other surprising anomalies. Nonetheless, they simply deduce that this type of study is impossible to make reliable in complex wartime conditions as faced by the Gazan population (not least the ability of manipulation by Hamas, who could surreptitiously direct researchers to families with the heaviest losses), rather than any flaws that could easily be ironed out. 

In reality, the report concludes that the numbers of total casualties reported by GMOH are likely to be close to reality. However, they state that “Where we do think it diverges from reality, to a limited, but significant, extent…, is in the gender and age distribution of the violence-associated casualties.” 

The essential problem with reporting

The report's authors emphasise the importance of understanding that when there is a single source of data, there must always be a degree of uncertainty about its reliability – historians have long pointed this out, as sources sometimes distort facts for ideological reasons. They also make clear that human rights organisations are not acting with malicious intent, more that they lack access to all the information needed, not least whether casualties were members of organised armed groups, such as Hamas and others – which distorts the numbers of civilians versus combatants killed in wartime. 

...when there is a single source of data, there must always be a degree of uncertainty about its reliability...

Figures given by Hamas-run entities, therefore, are not to be relied upon as certain facts. Rather, recognition is needed that they have an ideological motivation to inflate and distort numbers that gain them international sympathy.

Essentially, the report seeks to point out how “the combination of the UN agencies and human rights organizations’ difficulties in identifying the presence of covert fighters embedded in civilian populations, proscriptive interpretations of the laws of war, a human rights-interpretative orientation, and lack of military expertise in key positions leads to a systemic failure in assessing the actual ratio of combatant to civilian casualties during conflicts.” They finish off by proposing a more effective methodology in how to assess war crimes in conflict zones, particularly around source criticism and credibility assessment, which we will not summarise here.

Conclusion

To conclude The War on Truth Against Israel series, it is clearly evident that accusations of genocide have been fully refuted by the B-SCSS report. This is not to diminish the incredibly difficult and often traumatic challenges that Gazan civilians have faced during the two years of war, nor that there have, inevitably, been many civilian casualties.

Targeted, intentional genocide of the Palestinian population of Gaza, however, is an accusation that does not bear scrutiny, as all the evidence points to a careful attempt to minimise civilian casualties during a war against an enemy that deliberately embeds itself in the civilian population, refuses to agree to safe zones, hampers evacuation, and deliberately tries to augment civilian deaths, either through placing civilians in greater danger (human shields), or through data manipulation. 


The Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies report is written by the following scholars:
Prof. Danny Orbach is a military historian from the Department of History and Asian Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Dr. Jonathan Boxman is an independent scholar and an expert in quantitative analysis
Dr. Yagil Henkin is a military historian at Shalem College and the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security
Adv. Jonathan Braverman is a member of the Israeli bar and IHL lawyer