Hamas-run health ministry quietly removes thousands from Gaza death toll, researchers find

The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza has removed thousands of names from its death toll in its March casualty update without any notice, a new research by two separate reports claims.

Some 3,400 previously identified deaths from its August and October 2024 reports can no longer be found in the PDFs released by the ministry, which doesn’t differentiate between combatants and civilians.

At least 1,000 children are among those no longer on the list, according to two research reports, which corroborated each other's findings.

The data, showing ID numbers that have been removed from the ministry's most recent report, was made public on Monday by Salo Eisenberg, a researcher with the US-based NGO Honest Reporting.

"The lists were quite unreliable. We found rafts and rafts of mistakes," Andrew Fox, associate fellow at the UK-based think tank Henry Jackson Society, told Euronews.

The discrepancy has made researchers concerned about the possibility of numbers being intentionally inflated by Hamas, especially since the health ministry’s figures are widely reported in international media and seen as relevant by the likes of the UN, and triggering widespread social response and even political developments.

The concern is particularly exacerbated by the fact that the lists can be filled by anyone with a link to the document made available on Google Docs.

In turn, this means that Hamas could have gone through the list and deliberately added further names as casualties, affecting the total, but also the demographics of the victims.

"There were three reporting methodologies," said Fox, who published his analysis in December 2024. "There's actually having a physical body in a hospital. There's media sources, so the government media office essentially trawls social media to try and find reports of people who died and they add them to the list." 

"And then the third methodology is an online Google form that anyone can just fill in. You could fill it in right now. And that gets added to the list."

The big issue that stems from these findings is the discrepancy between the age and gender of those killed, which can make a difference between pointing to indiscriminate killings and typical combatant casualties in urban warfare, researchers believe, which is a key talking point among the anti-Israeli critics.

At the same time, Gaza is also one of the most densely populated places on Earth where almost 50% of the population is under 18 — compared to 18% in the European Union — meaning a high number of civilian casualties remains plausible, especially among the youth.

This opens the door to the possibility that the militant group is tweaking the numbers to turn the narrative to one of civilian plight and tragedy targeting women and children, while obfuscating its losses — and its role in the conflict.

"If you were seeing indiscriminate killing, you would expect roughly 26% adult male deaths," Fox said. "In the 13 to 55 age group, which is Hamas' fighter range because we know they use child soldiers, it's 72% male in that age group." 

"So all these things clearly point towards combatants being targeted rather than just indiscriminate killing."

The Hamas-run health ministry figures were considered accurate in previous conflicts in Gaza as independent international organisations corroborated them.

However, this is no longer the case ever since the start of the Israel-Hamas war sparked by the militant group’s 7 October attacks, killing some 1,200 civilians in Israel and taking hundreds hostage, as it became impossible to verify any claims about the situation on the ground due to a media blackout.

The health ministry has recently claimed that the number of deaths in the Strip has now surpassed 50,000. The Israeli military says it has killed some 20,000 Hamas combatants, while also reporting around 3,000 dead and wounded among its soldiers.

At the same time, it is unclear whether the ministry's computer system outage in November had any impact on the numbers it reported, which Fox says could also explain some of the errors. Other issues with the reports, however, point to questionable practices, he explained.

"I'd be very surprised if natural deaths weren't included on that list, because there's been no separate reporting of natural deaths whatsoever," he said.

"But by the same token, it is also very difficult. So on top of the stats padding, there will also be genuine mistakes on there."

"It's still a tragedy, no matter how many civilians have died," Fox pointed out. "But I think it's been remiss of the world's media to try and take these figures as gospel when plainly there are combatants dying."