(JNS) The casualty figures supplied by the Gaza Health Ministry are based on false and misleading data, according to a new report.
Despite the numbers being deeply unreliable, they have been widely accepted to support genocide claims against Israel, “and thereby are a major strategic victory of Hamas’s wartime information effort,” notes the report, titled, “Hamas Casualty Reports are a Tangle of Technical Problems.”
The report was co-authored by Lewi Stone, a professor of mathematical epidemiology in the mathematical sciences department at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, and Gregory Rose, an honorary professor of law at the Australian National Centre for Ocean Resources and Security (ANCORS) at the University of Wollongong, Australia.
Stone and Rose obtained access to a dataset published in January 2025 by a London-based researcher, who had unique access to time-stamped data from the Hamas-run Health Ministry. The dataset “allowed us to undertake a more in-depth analysis of statistics at different dates of the war across regions in Gaza.”
They used data provided by the ministry itself to show that the Israel Defense Forces took measures to avoid harming women and children in Gaza.
Given that 75% of Gaza’s population comprises women and children, if attacks were random, 75% of the victims should also be women and children, Stone told JNS. But the data shows that 51% of the victims were women and children over the course of 17 months of the war. This disparity suggests women and children fatalities were far less than Hamas has been claiming, and the impact on civilians was likely smaller.
“Moreover, women and children casualties trended to become an increasingly lower monthly proportion of casualties as the war progressed across time, again something Hamas never publicized,” Stone noted.
The two findings, the low percentage of women and children casualties relative to their total percentage of the population, and their decreasing proportion of the casualties as time went on, signal that IDF is limiting civilian casualties with increasing success.
In one example, Stone and Rose show that in the battles of Khan Yunis through the first quarter of 2024, 34% of deaths were women and children, although they made up 75% of the population.
“This MoH data showed the opposite picture to what one would expect from the narrative of Hamas and its allies who alleged indiscriminate killing. The percentage of women and children combatants could even be 10% less if Hamas combatants went unreported, as is likely,” the report said.
The ministry’s figures do not distinguish between combatants and noncombatants.
The researchers also used the Hamas data to disprove “many poisonous statements” made by foreign doctors who volunteered at Gazan hospitals and gave “misrepresented statistics of women and children injured and killed,” Stone told JNS.
Yet the Hamas Government Media Office is still claiming that the casualty rate among women and children is 70%. This despite the fact that in August 2024, the ministry’s Information Directorate reduced the figure to 60%, creating a new elderly category of mixed gender, Stone said.
All of this is assuming Hamas data is trustworthy enough to show “the most basic trends of the war,” said Stone. “MoH data must be approached with caution and nothing can be relied upon absolutely,” he added.
The single biggest issue is lack of identity verification of people reported to be dead via online notifications. “Thousands of online reports have been found to be erroneous or problematical,” he said, noting that at certain periods, “we could calculate the unverified identifications component included in the death toll as having been nearly all (>92%) designated as women and children, which was absurd.”
“The second biggest issue is that there are many demonstrable inconsistencies within the data, including those that reveal deliberately fabricated figures. Even the Ministry of Health data is in total contradiction to the Gaza Media Office that pushes out the statistics to the world,” he said.
When asked if the Gaza numbers were accepted because they were the only numbers being issued, the authors of the report said no. The reason, they said, was essentially antisemitism.
“The Hamas accusations were readily accepted because they resonate with culturally embedded preconceptions among Abrahamic faith members who numerically dominate the U.N., global media and academia,” they said.
“They recognize the market for accusations of fundamental evils committed by Jews who kill God, cook with the blood of non-Jewish children, poison public wells, extort for financial gain, are subhuman and weak, devilishly omnipotent and evil. Allegations of crimes against humanity by Israel merely adapt these preconceptions to 21st century terminology,” they explained.
The two hope their report will help disprove the genocide allegations and become part of the evidence to defend Israel in the International Court of Justice, which is currently hearing a case brought by South Africa accusing Israel of committing genocide.
They also hope “to provide a case study for use in the development of strategies to counter disinformation operations employed in asymmetrical warfare that exploit civilian shields, ultimately to discourage the use of civilian shields.”
