Since Israel entered Gaza in response to the 10/7 attack by Hamas, the Gaza Ministry of Health has been putting out casualty numbers. It was big news when those figures passed 30,000 at the end of February.
The death toll in Gaza passed a somber milestone on Thursday as the local health ministry reported that more than 30,000 people had been killed in the war since Oct. 7.
The number of deaths since Israel launched its military offensive against Hamas in Gaza had already surpassed the tolls of any previous Arab conflict with Israel when it rose above 20,000 in December. Many experts say the official toll is very likely an undercount, given the difficulty of accurately tallying deaths amid unrelenting fighting, communications disruptions, a collapsing medical system and people still believed to be under rubble.
Still, the reported figure is staggering — roughly one person killed for every 73 Palestinians in Gaza, whose population is about 2.2 million.
The figures provided by the Gazan health ministry do not distinguish between civilians and combatants. Many international observers have said they believe that the ministry’s overall toll is reliable, while the proportion of Hamas-affiliated fighters among those killed remains unclear.
The numbers are routinely taken as factual, even though they come from a health ministry controlled by Hamas. And as mentioned, none of the dead are listed as Hamas fighters even though Hamas fighters are the primary opponents Israel is targeting.
This week, Tablet published a story written by a professor of statistics at Wharton. Abraham Wyner argues that the Hamas-approved numbers don’t make sense and are almost certainly fabricated.
Here’s the problem with this data: The numbers are not real. That much is obvious to anyone who understands how naturally occurring numbers work. The casualties are not overwhelmingly women and children, and the majority may be Hamas fighters.
One sign that something is wrong with the numbers: There seems to be no correlation between the number of women killed and the number of children.
…on the days with many women casualties there should be large numbers of children casualties, and on the days when just a few women are reported to have been killed, just a few children should be reported. This relationship can be measured and quantified by the R-square (R2 ) statistic that measures how correlated the daily casualty count for women is with the daily casualty count for children. If the numbers were real, we would expect R2 to be substantively larger than 0, tending closer to 1.0. But R2 is .017 which is statistically and substantively not different from 0.
There are other problems:
Finally, on Feb. 15, Hamas admitted to losing 6,000 of its fighters, which represents more than 20% of the total number of casualties reported.
Taken together, Hamas is reporting not only that 70% of casualties are women and children but also that 20% are fighters. This is not possible unless Israel is somehow not killing noncombatant men, or else Hamas is claiming that almost all the men in Gaza are Hamas fighters.
This isn’t the only time the Hamas-approved casualty numbers have been questioned. In January the Washington Institute for Near East Policy put out an analysis which similarly questioned the apparently downplaying of male casualties. Here’s a bit of the executive summary.
Counting fatalities in the midst of any conflict is difficult, let alone in urban battles like those playing out in Gaza. Hamas has exceptional incentives—plus the means, methods, and opportunities—to exaggerate the numbers of civilian deaths. Most obviously, Gaza Health Ministry and GMO metrics show signs of being repeatedly massaged to omit or obscure male fatalities—the category most likely to include combatants. If Gaza fatality counts fail to distinguish combatants from noncombatants, underreport the deaths of men, and highlight the deaths of women and children—as they have done until now—then observers can be expected to assume that mainly women and children are being killed.
Although thousands of Palestinian noncombatants, including military-age males, have undoubtedly been killed in the Hamas-initiated conflict, the world must also recognize that the group has manipulated and exploited civilian fatality claims for its strategic benefit, in an attempt to truncate Israel’s air and ground operations and stir international outrage. The international media and NGOs have repeated such claims without proper scrutiny and in turn validated and reinforced Hamas propaganda efforts. In reality, no one yet knows the proportion of civilians harmed versus Hamas fighters, and judgment should be reserved or at least qualified as an interim assessment informed largely by low-quality metrics provided by a combatant with a track record of propagandizing civilian deaths.
For Israel’s part, they claim to have killed as many as 12,000 Hamas fighters since the start of their entry into Gaza.
The Israel Defense Forces said Monday that troops have killed some 12,000 of Hamas’s estimated 30,000 gunmen in the Gaza Strip since war erupted on October 7, after a Qatar-based official for the terror group claimed it had lost half that number — some 6,000 fighters — during the four-month-old conflict.
Hamas is also believed to have thousands of operatives who are seriously wounded and unable to fight.
We may never know the actual numbers but at this point I don’t see any reason to trust Hamas as a source more than the IDF.