The Palestinian terrorist group Hamas inflated the death count from the war in Gaza, including natural deaths and cancer patients in the data — and global media outlets faithfully reported the exaggerated totals to vilify Israel.
That’s the conclusion of a new report by the Henry Jackson Society, which is based in the United Kingdom but named for the legendary Sen. Henry Jackson (D-WA), an hawkish Democrat known for his anti-communist foreign policy.
The report, Questionable Counting: Analysing the Death Toll from the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza, made the following findings about problems in data from the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry (original emphasis):
Men listed as women to inflate female fatalities. Analysis of Gaza Ministry of Health (MoH) fatality data reveals repeated instances of men being misclassified as women. Examples include individuals with male first names (e.g. Mohammed) being recorded as female. This misclassification contributes to the narrative that civilian populations, particularly women and children, bear the brunt of the conflict, potentially influencing international sentiment and media coverage.
Adults registered as children. Significant discrepancies have been uncovered where adult fatalities are reclassified as children. For instance, an individual aged 22 was listed as a fouryear-old and a 31-year-old was listed as an infant. Such distortions inflate the number of child casualties, which is emotionally impactful and heavily emphasised in global reporting. These misrepresentations suggest a deliberate attempt to frame the conflict as disproportionately affecting children, undermining the credibility of the fatality data.
Disproportionate deaths of fighting-age men. Data analysis indicates that most fatalities are men aged 15–45, contradicting claims that civilian populations are being disproportionately targeted. This age demographic aligns closely with the expected profile of combatants, further supported by spikes in deaths of men reported by family sources rather than hospitals. This evidence suggests that many fatalities classified as civilian may be combatants, a distinction omitted from official reporting.
Inclusion of natural deaths in reporting. Despite the typical annual rate of 5,000 natural deaths in Gaza, the fatality data provides no accounting for such figures. This omission raises concerns that natural deaths, as well as deaths caused by internal violence or misfired rockets, are being included in war-related fatality counts. Instances of cancer patients, previously registered for treatment, appearing on war fatality lists further support this assertion. Such practices inflate the reported civilian death toll, complicating accurate assessments of the conflict’s impact.
Media underreporting of combatant deaths. Analysis of media coverage reveals that only 3% of news stories reference combatant deaths, with outlets like the BBC, CNN, Reuters and The New York Times primarily relying on Gaza Ministry of Health figures. These figures often lack verification and fail to distinguish between combatants and civilians. The omission creates a skewed narrative that portrays all casualties as civilian, thus shaping public opinion and international policy based on incomplete or manipulated data. For example, more than 17,000 Hamas combatants are estimated to have been killed, yet these figures are largely excluded from global reporting.
The report also notes:
Only 5% of the surveyed media organisations cited numbers released by the Israeli authorities, while 98% cited fatality figures provided by the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health.
In 19% of media reports examined, numbers provided by Hamas-run institutions were used without citing any source, thereby suggesting those figures were undisputed.
Furthermore, fewer than one in every 50 articles mentioned that the figures provided by the MoH were unverifiable or controversial. Strikingly, the Israeli statistics had their credibility questioned in half of the few articles that incorporated them.
Read the full report here.
Hamas also repeatedly lied about mass casualty events in Gaza, famously claiming that Israel had killed 500 people in an airstrike on a hospital, when in fact the hospital parking lot had been hit by an errant rocket fired by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group, and there were relatively few deaths (50 at the most, according to later studies).
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
