Hamas ‘quietly drops’ thousands of deaths from casualty figures

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.

The casualty lists are released as PDFs by the Hamas-run Gaza ministry of health, which has been cited by international media as a source for fatality figures in the enclave since the start of the war.

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.

Andrew Fox, the author of the report, said the latest deletions are likely to have been an attempt by Hamas to retain credibility.

“We knew there were rafts of errors in their reporting,” Mr Fox said. “There’s a reasonable explanation in that their computer systems went down in November 2023, so it’s been challenging for them to report accurately, but the lists are so unreliable that the world’s media shouldn’t be quoting them as reliable.”

He added: “The UN also just takes Hamas’s figures and publishes them with a note stating the figures are unconfirmed.”

The Hamas lists contain information such as names and ID numbers, and can be filled in by anyone with a link to the Google form for the document.

Hamas will “have gone through the list, trying to make it as convincing as possible. They’ve been accepting names onto that list with no evidence whatsoever,” explained Mr Fox. “So what I’m guessing they’re trying to do is thin out the names they cannot substantiate at all.”

Mr Fox, a former British paratrooper who has worked with Mr Aizenberg on previous research, said the teams use the publicly available Hamas data and cross check it name by name.

“Salo’s research would be looking for names that were on previous lists but have now disappeared,” Mr Fox explained. “Hamas releases lists as PDFs so it’s harder to do comparisons but we transfer names to an excel sheet to do a mass comparison this way.”

Mr Fox noted that data within Hamas’ own lists undermines its claim that most casualties have been civilians.

“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.

“This has led to a narrative where the Israel Defense Forces are portrayed as disproportionately targeting civilians, while the actual numbers suggest a significant proportion of the dead are combatants.”

Hamas has claimed the number of deaths in Gaza since the start of the war is now more than 50,000.

The IDF says it has killed 20,000 Hamas combatants during the fighting, and does all it can to mitigate civilian casualties.

“The IDF makes great efforts to estimate and consider potential civilian collateral damage in its strikes. The IDF has never, and will never, deliberately target children,” the IDF said in a statement.

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