1 week Ago By Greg Rose
[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]I[/fusion_dropcap]n the 2023-2025 Hamas-Israel war, Hamas has won the battle to control information. Its strategic victory will have enduring consequences.Control of information has always been essential in wartime.
Disinformation is an engineering tool for surprises, ruses, hybrid attacks, disorientation, distraction and demoralisation. It is always prominent during active hostilities and is also used in the ‘grey zone’ phase prior to firing the first shot. In its active hybrid warfare strategy, Hamas with its allies mobilised disinformation on Gazan civilian suffering into global media, diplomacy, governments, educational institutions and law courts to attack the fabric of Israeli society.
It is said that truth is the first casualty of war. There is no doubt that civilians have suffered grievously in this conflict, and each loss is a tragedy. However, accurately determining the proportion of civilians among the dead is a critical and necessary task -- one Hamas has controlled as a powerful weapon.
Some may argue that questioning Gaza’s casualty figures diminishes the human suffering of war. On the contrary. The implications of inaccurate or false figures are profoundly cynical and immoral.
Numbers are assumed to be objective, but in conflicts such as this, they are anything but. They are uncertain, contestable, withheld, selected, manipulated, falsified and spun. Earlier research, including our own in 2024, uncovered major fraud in Hamas women and children casualty statistics, after which UN agencies became more cautious in quoting exaggerated Hamas daily figures and Hamas itself altered its reporting to become opaquer.
In our new 2025 report for the Henry Jackson Society, we provide statistical analysis demonstrating how Hamas weaponised fatality numbers. The Hamas-run Ministry of Health Information Centre and regime Media Office provided curated casualty data for international consumption to fit Hamas’s wartime narrative. Our rigorous analysis of Hamas reported casualty figures revealed significant inconsistencies and a calculated effort to distort reality and shape the narrative of the conflict.
When compared to Hamas public statements, the raw data from published Gazan hospital records yielded insights that revealed Hamas’s methods of disinformation. No doubt, in the future, there will be less such raw data made available.[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]O[/fusion_dropcap]ur report demonstrates that, while war is chaotic, Hamas’s manipulation of statistics was anything but random.
Patterns within the data itself revealed a systematic effort to obscure the number of combatants killed, blur the lines between civilian and combatant deaths, to selectively release civilian casualty information, to issue false headline data, to inflate civilian death tolls and to create an image of overwhelming victimhood. Despite this, the unreported underlying raw data nevertheless traced the significant impacts of Israeli troops efforts to limit harm to civilians.The Hamas Media Office claims of women and children casualties routinely exceeded those of the Ministry, even though supposedly based upon the Ministry.
Both regularly claimed in headline data that 70% of casualties are women and children, despite Gazan underlying casualty data records contradicting this assertion. The exaggerated women and children casualty numbers were partly achieved by exclusion of large numbers of men, which reversed the real trends over time for key variables.In fact, women and children casualty rates were well below 70%, certainly so after ground troops entered and dominated the fighting, following the first solely aerial phase of the war, Across the war so far, women and children comprise about half of all casualties despite their comprising three quarters of the Gazan population.
A simple calculation shows that 70% (or 70:30) is 2.33 times more deadly for women and children than a rate of 50% (or 1:1).Surprisingly, we found that in some battlespaces, women and children casualty rates were down to about 35%, such as during the armed conflict in Khan Yunis in the first four months of 2024, when casualty rates for men of combat age were over-represented nearly fivefold.
We show this in the figure below, plotted from the raw data.Distribution by age of all casualties, male (blue) and female (red), in Khan Yunis between January 1 and May 1 in 2024. Adult males (18 years) represent 25% of population but are over-represented by a factor of five.
Women and children comprise 34% of all casualties, although they represent 75% of the population. This indicates that Israel is taking major precautions in its attempts to avoid harming women and children. The blue area commences at 0 on the vertical axis but is overlaid.
The histogram signals that the Israeli army must have been taking major precautions attempting to avoid harm to women and children there over a lengthy four-month period of intense urban fighting. In contrast, in recent urban armed conflicts in other parts of the world, civilians comprise two to nine times more casualties than combatants, instead of a fraction of combatants as seen here.[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]o further obscure the casualty data, the Hamas Ministry of Health did not distinguish, identify and separately publish thousands of deaths from natural causes or disease, or those killed by Hamas itself.
It included as fatalities thousands of people who were reported online, created placeholder identities, and it belatedly admitted that many were not properly verified or were not even dead.Moreover, the Ministry did not report some known Hamas fallen operatives and removed some others from its casualty lists, which further inflated the relative the rate of civilian casualties, and it presented all deaths as 'civilian'.When questioned by a few in the press about internal inconsistencies in its data, the Ministry gave misleading explanations that proved to be false.
Our report for the Henry Jackson Society shows how epidemiological models predicting astronomical death tolls based on Ministry data were wildly exaggerated, yet they persisted like ghosts in the genocide discourse.Rarely studied injury data from hospitals allowed us to discern whether anecdotal reports about civilian casualties given by visiting foreign doctors were validated by corroborative raw hospital data, but in fact they were contradicted. As an example, the leader of the group claimed: “Overwhelmingly, our victims were children.
I would say 70-75% of the people we operated on were elementary school age or younger.” Yet the Hamas Ministry of Health statistics for the same hospital during that period show a different picture: children were the group with least number of injuries, 16% of the total, while adult men nearly 60%.We also found that over much of 2024 the Ministry did not publish data on changes in the dynamics of the war over time, as is usually done.
It published cumulative casualties that were jumbled leading to complete misrepresentation of changes of the war’s intensity over time, especially for disaggregated men, women and children casualties. The Ministry’s key publications also made it difficult to make sense and keep track of Gazan unidentified casualties or to see that the overall monthly rate of identified Gazan casualties in mid-2024 was down to about 15 percent of what it was at the start of the war.The tragic reality is that Hamas’ military defeat was always inevitable.
Its leadership knew this. In response, it turned its own people into a macabre sacrifice, orchestrating a gruesome tableau designed to indict and delegitimise Israel. Its hybrid warfare strategy drove multiple points of international pressure through a narrative of genocide that struck against the entirety of the Israeli society.
The strategy had the unique advantage of targeting the Jewish country, which ensured most global media eagerly propagated it.This narrative -- the centrepiece of Hamas’s wartime disinformation -- has been its greatest strategic victory in the awful months since October 7, 2023.Greg Rose was a recent visiting fellow at the Australia/Israel Jewish Affairs CouncilThe post Gaza by Numbers, the Real Numbers first appeared on Quadrant.
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