Hamas ‘quietly drops’ thousands of deaths from casualty figures

[Twiglets1]

Article in the Telegraph (unfortunately behind a paywall).

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.”

About 72% 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.”

www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/04/01/hamas-drops-thousands-of-deaths-from-casualty-figurures/

@Twiglets1
I am glad you can appreciate the suffering of Palestinians too, as both those in Israel and Gaza have and do continue to suffer.

I will infer from your last post that you also think it is not the numbers then that matter in quantifying suffering, as far more Palestinians have been killed.

This makes the original article you posted and Andrew Fox so called research piece even more disgusting. Why are they pointing out that of 50,000 or so deaths- 5000 may have happened anyway? I can only assume it is to try and reduce criticism of Israeli actions- but most people will see through this.

By the way, dumb bombs IDF uses can’t read people’s minds and determine if they are Hamas supporters.

Right to life is also not contingent on political view. Imagine if we said it was ok to make those Israelis who have supported Netanyahu’s current actions in Gaza to suffer?

I don’t agree the original article I posted was disgusting, I found it interesting and think others did too based on the number of likes I got from Mumsnet users and the fact it generated a discussion. The article did not just focus on the number of Palestinians killed according to Hamas but also on the demographic breakdown of the casualties. Fewer children, more men of fighting age - that tells us something about Hamas propaganda.

I do of course know that dumb bombshell kill indiscriminately. I’ll reserve my sympathy for the innocent Palestinian civilians caught up in a war they didn’t want, not the ones who support Hamas & celebrated their atrocious actions on October 7th & cheered at the disgustingly theatrical release of hostages.

Well we will have to disagree @Twiglets1
Your original post and it’s likes say a lot about some of the pro-Israeli people on this board.

We will agree to disagree @Polka83

I think they are just interested in the truth about the demographics of the people getting killed & Hamas themselves have changed their data about that.

I don’t think the commentators understand how hard it is to identify the dead when you have multiple mass casualty events caused by bunker buster bombs while the infrastructure and those tasked with keeping the records and passing the information on are also under daily attack,

It is quite normal to adjust fatality figures during breaks in active conflict (ceasefires) or post conflict because you need time, space, and forensics to identify exactly how many died.

Let’s not forget that the number of victims of Oct 7th underwent a lot of revisions down as well. For the same reasons. Initial estimates were that 3,000+ were killed, then that was revised down to 2,500 in Dec 2023. Then it was revised down to 1,400. Then to 1,200. Now we have the final total of 1,139.

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.”

Also, the flaw with this method is that the commentators are looking at identified deaths. To clarify, identified deaths are where you have a body or pieces of one and know 100% who the the body is. Not knowing who the body is or misidentifying a body doesn’t mean you don’t still have a dead body. The death goes from identified, back to unidentified.

It is likely some of the names that have been taken off the lists of the dead are cases of misidentification of who is dead as well as potential revisions in the total number of dead.

When it comes to bodies of children and women, they are smaller and will be more likely to be reduced to lumps of unrecognisable flesh and decompose faster. So these are harder to identify. After mass casualty events the identity of men will always be done faster than for women and children. Tens of thousands of people listed as missing also complicate the task of matching an identity to a body.

Overall, a revision of 3,400 out of over 50,000 is a very minor adjustment, especially when we consider other similar examples.

The figures revised down are the # of casualties that have been identified as a specific person. You can’t draw any conclusions on % gender/age of total casualties from this data set. Finally, it is totally normal that misidentification of bodies will happen causing revisions to the numbers especially as the conflict continues. There will also be revisions to the total # of casualties- identified and unidentified. Revisions usually go down in war zone deaths, not up. There is nothing unusual or sinister or falsified about this.

That’s what the study implies, but the data they use, identified casualties, is the wrong data to draw those conclusions. They should have used total casualties.

I would expect that the data in a country whose entire infrastructure has been destroyed is incredibly hard to verify. Some were misidentified and have now been identified. 3,000 is less than 10 percent of the total people killed and in a war zone there must be a pretty big margin of error.

You would also expect a country or state to be able to identify and distinguish between their combatants and civilians though wouldn’t you if they are in a position to verify numbers at all?