And this is why you don’t take Hamas at its word, ladies and gentlemen of the world.
In November 2024, a rash of headlines appeared about the human toll of the crisis in the Gaza Strip. The headlines speak for themselves. CNN: “Around 70 percent of deaths in Gaza are women and children, says UN.” Al Jazeera: “Nearly 70 percent of deaths in Gaza are women and children: UN.” Reuters: “Gaza women, children are nearly 70 percent of verified war dead, UN rights office says.”
The fact that this information was coming from the U.N. Human Rights Office was supposed to give this some weight, even though the verified number of victims, 8,119, Reuters reported, “is a much lower number than the toll of more than 43,000 provided by Palestinian health authorities for the 13-month-old war.”
However, it insisted, the UNHRO only counted “fatalities it has managed to verify with three sources.”
Never mind that many of these outlets later reported the Palestinian health authorities’ inflated number of 50,000 alleged fatalities. Never mind, too, that the phrase “Palestinian health authorities” is a sanitized way to say the Gaza Ministry of Health, which is to say it’s Hamas controlled. It turns out even these numbers were very, very false.
According to a report in Tuesday’s U.K. Telegraph, Hamas has quietly dropped thousands of names from its war casualty figures in Gaza during a March update, including over a thousand children.
This means, as the Jerusalem Post reported, that “[a]pproximately 72 percent of fatalities between the ages of 13-55 are men — the demographic category [which] aligns with Hamas combatants.”
And you can practically hear the crickets coming from the pro-Palestinian side, can’t you?
Salo Aizenberg of American non-profit Honest Reporting was one of the first to note the news.
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“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,” Aizenberg wrote.
“These ‘deaths’ never happened. The numbers were falsified — again,” he added.
Andrew Fox, who authored a report for the Henry Jackson Society in December, which posited that the numbers had been jacked up by officials, said that the deletions were likely “deaths” that they could no longer provide any sort of reasonable evidence for — and what passes as reasonable evidence is a very low bar, indeed.
“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,” the December report 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.”
“We knew there were rafts of errors in their reporting,” Fox said regarding the March numbers.
“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.”
And, as for the U.N. Human Rights Office? “The U.N. also just takes Hamas’s figures and publishes them with a note stating the figures are unconfirmed,” Fox said.
Oh.
The lists from Hamas, he said, contains names and ID numbers of the alleged deceased, but can be filled in by anyone who has a link to the form via Google, per the Telegraph.
Hamas, Fox told the Telegraph, 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. So what I’m guessing they’re trying to do is thin out the names they cannot substantiate at all.”
As for the 13-55 demographic, Fox said, “We know that Hamas uses child soldiers, and these statistics show clearly that Israel is targeting fighting-aged men.”
In other words, even Hamas doesn’t think the world is stupid enough to believe what college activists will.
And, for the rest of you keeping score at home, we’ve gone from the U.N., allegedly having verified in triplicate, stating that 70 percent of all fatalities in Gaza were women and children — although in much lower figures than initially claimed — to this list being thinned out to the extent that 72 percent of the individuals killed were males of fighting age and the allegation that all the United Nations is doing is passing along the official Hamas line, as well. They may not be as credulous as the media is with the Gaza Ministry of Health, but they’re still pretty credulous.
Just in case you needed reminding, foreign observers: Hamas still can’t be trusted. Further bulletins as events warrant.
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