Debunked Hamas Casualty Figures and Their Impact on Reporting

Since October 7, 2023, Hamas has shaped global public opinion through its propaganda warfare. The terrorist organization excitedly recorded and uploaded the atrocities committed against Israelis that day to social media platforms, and those who saw any trace of it were rightfully horrified.

But shortly after, when the images weren’t as fresh and no longer front-page news, Hamas turned to a new strategy — playing victim to the Israeli army. And since then, the media has run with it.

For instance, on October 17, 2023, reports claimed an explosion occurred inside the Al-Ahli Hospital. The media rushed to re-print Hamas’ claim that more than 500 people had been killed.

Evidence then came out that displayed it was a parking lot adjacent to the hospital that had been hit by a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket, and the casualties were fewer than reported.

The media has continued this pattern since. Any death toll that the Hamas-run Ministry of Health (MoH) publishes is immediately reported on by Western media, oftentimes without any attribution to Hamas.

This has resulted in blood libels being printed on the front pages of newspapers, blaming Israel for targeting non-combatants, including women and children.

But the vast majority of the casualty numbers that have been used throughout the war have been purposefully misrepresented by Hamas.

As of December 2025, the Hamas-run MoH has claimed that over 70,000 people have died in Gaza since the start of the war.

But further analysis done by Salo Aizenberg, a board member of HonestReporting, displays that this includes the casualties of Hamas fighters, natural deaths, and internal fighting amongst Gazans.

While the analysis is based on informed estimates, and the precise toll may take years to verify, it nonetheless highlights the extent to which Gaza casualty figures have been misrepresented in media coverage over the past two years.

Although it is difficult to determine the exact number of terrorists killed by the IDF since the beginning of the war, estimates suggest the number to be more than 22,000 as of October 2025, not including those who were killed during the terrorist attacks on October 7. US President Donald Trump has confirmed the number to be greater than 25,000, the number used in Aizenberg’s analysis.

Beyond combatants, throughout the war, there were likely to be around 11,000 natural deaths, based on pre-war patterns. Another 4,000 deaths were caused by internal fighting within Gaza from different factions, including firing on civilians at aid sites or executions of individuals Hamas deemed to be collaborating with Israel. An additional 1,000 estimated deaths can be attributed to errors in reporting.

After removing these casualty numbers from the total of 70,000, there are a remaining 54,000 deaths. Of the 54,000, one can reasonably assume that around 25,000 were terrorists, leaving 36,000 civilian casualties. While every innocent civilian casualty is a tragedy, this is nonetheless a remarkably low civilian-to-combatant ratio of 1.45:1, especially given the circumstances of urban warfare.

Visualization based on data by Salo Aizenberg.

These numbers entirely dispute the claims that the majority of deaths are civilians — a claim the media has previously made. One “investigative” piece done by The Guardian and +972 Magazine, published in the summer of 2025, claimed that 83% of casualties were civilians.

What the outlets willfully omitted, however, was that this figure counted only terrorists whom the IDF had identified before the war and could conclusively confirm as eliminated, excluding thousands of combatants who could not be identified during the fighting. By presenting this partial dataset as comprehensive, the article created a misleading impression that was then cited as authoritative.

This information is not necessarily new either.

A December 2024 report by the Henry Jackson Society found that 84% of the publications analyzed failed to make the critical distinction in total numbers between combatant deaths and civilian deaths, further illustrating the extent to which misleading casualty narratives have been allowed to take hold. The report also found that men of combat age were disproportionally represented, and natural deaths were included in casualty statistics.

Perhaps even more telling is the ratio between male and female casualties. Males of combat age (18-59) died at 3x the rate of women the same age, resulting in a 3:1 ratio. The 32,690 deaths of men of combat age account for 46.7% of total casualties.

Visualization based on data by Salo Aizenberg.

Yet, over the course of the war, the opposite claim has been made in major newspapers.

Outlets, including the Associated Press, BBC, and Washington Post, have all previously parroted the claim that 70% of the casualties in the war were women and children. Naturally, it was based on falsified data, and the new casualty analysis once again disproves this claim.

Even after the UN walked back this percentage due to incomplete information, news outlets have continued to print that more than half of the casualties are women and children.

Throughout the two years of war, the media have repeatedly reprinted Hamas’ libels and casualty figures with little skepticism, allowing a terrorist organization to shape the narrative without rigorous analysis or verification.

Inflated civilian casualty claims will continue to distort public understanding of the war by obscuring the true civilian-to-combatant and male-to-female casualty ratios.

It is therefore only responsible journalism for every outlet that published Hamas’ casualty figures without questioning them to issue corrections and acknowledge that not every casualty during the war has been the result of IDF action.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.