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henryjacksonsociety.org

Sides in an armed conflict have an interest to exaggerate or downplay losses. This report tries to poke holes in the reports of casualties from Gaza by examining the released data. Collecting casualty data under the conditions in Gaza is of course difficult and bound to not be perfect.

Key Findings

The Ministry of Health (MoH) under the Hamas government in Gaza has produced casualty data throughout the 2023–2025 Hamas–Israel war in Gaza. Our analysis of this data, which drills into records produced by Gaza hospitals, shows the following:

  1. LOCAL DATA PROVIDES A STRONG SIGNAL THAT ISRAELI MILITARY TRIED TO LIMIT GAZAN CIVILIAN HARM: Empirical evidence across cross-sections of the data provided by the MoH itself showed that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) took measures that tried to avoid harming women and children. To illustrate: in Khan Yunis across January-May 2024, MoH data showed that women and children combined (who comprise 75% of the Gazan population) comprised 34% of all deaths; that is, less than half of the 70% Hamas claimed.

  2. CUMULATIVE DATA FOR ENTIRE WAR SHOWED LESS CIVILIAN HARM THAN HAMAS ALLEGED: The most recent (March 2025) cumulative list of 50,021 identified casualties showed that the proportion of women and children’s mortalities (W&C) over the whole war was 51% (25,401 / 50,021). (Across 2024, women and children comprised 40% to 43% of the injured.) Approximately 45% of all Gazan deaths were legal fighting-age males (18 ≤ M ≤ 59) but a significant additional component as child casualties were male underage combatants. These statistics signal that, over the whole war across all Gaza, the IDF sought to avoid civilians and that harm to civilians was far less than Hamas alleged publicly.

  3. RECENT PREPONDERANCE OF MALE CASUALTIES: MoH March 2025 data showed that, among 11,224 new casualties in the seven months since 7 October 2024, there were 8,565 males (76.3%) and 2,659 females (23.7%). Among these new casualties, 58% were legal combat-age males and an additional unknown but significant proportion were underage combatant males. The reduced proportion of casualties that were women and children (down to 38%) over the most recent 7 months of data-reportage indicates improvement over time of Israeli efforts to avoid Gazan civilian harm. The new data raises questions about whether a large number of males previously went unreported, or whether Hamas had simply over-represented women and children casualties in the past.

  4. DOWNWARD TREND IN OVERALL CASUALTIES: The highest rates of combatant and civilian casualties occurred in October 2023 to early January 2024, according to time- stamped MoH casualty data made available in 2025. The rate of overall casualties declined through 2024 down to an intensity of 10 to 20% of the initial rate in October 2023.

  5. CONTRADICTORY HAMAS WAR CASUALTY NARRATIVES: Smoothly packaged and widely propagated Hamas Government Media Office (GMO) information press releases that claimed 70% women and children casualties were in contradiction with the more reliable Ministry of Health raw datasets. GMO data showed that children’s deaths were more numerous than adult women or men, while MoH data showed that men were most numerous. Nevertheless, MoH ‘dashboard’ infographics and public statements were demonstrably false when compared to its own datasets; for example, its repeated publishing of a 70% women and children casualty rate that was inconsistent with its detailed hospital- sourced datasets. These various contradictions enabled Hamas to argue various different narratives when convenient.

  6. OBSCURED CASUALTY DATA TRENDS: The Ministry data did not describe the war chronologically nor provide a reliable picture of trends across time because date-stamped information was never published, despite being held. The dates of deaths of Gazans were not published with their identity details. The data contained so many inconsistencies, Hamas Casualty Reports are a Tangle of Technical Problems 6 major changes and large-scale corrections shuffled across different time periods that, in general, it was almost unusable for studying casualty trends. The changes also made it difficult to test even very simple hypotheses with the data.

  7. COMPROMISED INTEGRITY OF DATASETS DUE TO UNVERIFIED DATA: Standard verification of identities of casualties was done in hospitals and morgues by verification of bodies and documents but there were 15,070 unidentified casualties reported by 31 March

  8. Almost 14,000 were later identified via online electronic forms by 7 October 2024. Verification processes for identification of many of these casualties were dubious. Due to their many anomalies, such as inclusions of living people on the list, doubts remain concerning both identities of casualties and actualities of deaths. This concern was recognised as serious even by the Hamas MoH Chief Data Scientist and Director of Information.

  9. SUPPRESSION OF DATA ON HAMAS CASUALTIES: Many Hamas combatant casualties were not listed, as key Hamas leaders known to have been killed were not listed as casualties. For example, some of Hamas leader Sinwar’s close family who were initially on the lists were taken off. If significant numbers of Hamas adult male combatants were not listed, then all estimates of the proportion of women and children casualties were actually lower.

  10. MISLEADING EXPLANATIONS OF DATA ANOMALIES: The MoH Director of Information gave various contradictory explanations for data anomalies. For instance, repeated explanations that each non-standard identification went through a verification process of approval by a judicial committee and that no natural deaths were included proved false. The MoH’s inability to explain its basic data-processing procedures hindered data analysis.

  11. ERRONEOUS FOREIGN ACADEMIC AND MEDICAL ACCOUNTS OF CIVILIAN DEATHS: Academic epidemiological studies forecast exaggerated Gazan casualties, vastly greater than actual casualties later reported by the Hamas Ministry of Health, and were based on erroneous modelling. Their predictions can be proved to be false retroactively by MoH data. Similarly, foreign doctors visiting Gaza from Western countries to provide medical assistance published allegations that Israeli Defence Forces targeted women and children; these proved to be inconsistent with MoH’s Gazan hospital datasets.

  12. DISINFORMATION SUCCESS: The Hamas Ministry of Health provided disinformation that served Hamas’s wartime narrative. For example, it presented all Gazan war casualties as civilians and none as combatants, falsely presented adult male casualties as women and children, and its datasets did not separately list deaths by natural causes nor disclose those killed by Hamas itself. Casualty data was deleted, shuffled across periods, recategorised across incomparable categories and included corrupting data. Yet the Ministry of Health civilian casualty numbers were widely accepted as having integrity and supporting allegations of genocide, thereby achieving a strategic victory for Hamas.