Hamas has removed more than 3,400 previously reported deaths from its official casualty figures, including 1,080 alleged child fatalities, according to new research that asserts the numbers were knowingly falsified.
On Tuesday, The Telegraph reported that a March update from the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health drastically revised down its earlier tallies of war dead. According to Honest Reporting’s Salo Aizenberg, the updated fatality list dropped thousands of names that had been publicly listed in PDFs released in August and October of 2024.
“These ‘deaths’ never happened,” he stated. “The numbers were falsified – again.”
New research shows that Hamas has quietly dropped thousands of deaths from its Gaza war casualty figureshttps://t.co/FBn8sSpOGk
— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) April 1, 2025
Hamas’s Gaza Health Ministry has been routinely cited by global media and United Nations agencies as a primary source of Gaza war casualty figures since the Israel-Hamas conflict began in October 2023, after thousands of terrorists stormed into Israel, massacred festivalgoers and hunted down Jewish civilians for torture, rape, execution, and kidnapping. However, its credibility has faced growing scrutiny.
A December report by the Henry Jackson Society concluded that Hamas had likely inflated civilian deaths to shape international perception and paint Israel as intentionally targeting non-combatants. The recent deletions, researcher Andrew Fox told The Telegraph, appear to be an effort by Hamas to salvage credibility amid intensifying challenges to its data.
“We knew there were rafts of errors in their reporting,” Fox said. “The lists are so unreliable that the world’s media shouldn’t be quoting them as reliable.”
Fox, a former British paratrooper, noted that Gaza’s death reports are often built on crowd-sourced entries submitted via a public Google form, containing names and ID numbers without proper verification. Fox and Aizenberg’s team cross-referenced publicly released Hamas PDFs by converting them to Excel format to track discrepancies and identify names quietly dropped.
Hamas’s own data undermines its narrative, Fox said. Although the group has claimed that women and children comprise around 70 percent of the dead, Fox noted that 72 percent of deaths among those aged 13 to 55 are male — the typical demographic for Hamas fighters.
He added that the data also reveals how the group’s known use of child soldiers distorts the civilian combatant split.
“The demographics are the most important thing in all this,” he stated. “We’ve heard the claims that about 70 percent of the deaths are women and children, and these lists, especially the most recent, show that’s complete nonsense.”
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) estimate they have killed 20,000 Hamas combatants during the war, and maintain that they go to significant lengths to avoid civilian casualties.
“The IDF has never, and will never, deliberately target children,” the military said in a statement.
The Henry Jackson Society’s earlier findings also revealed that the Hamas-controlled health ministry had included in its war death toll individuals who died prior to the conflict, while failing to differentiate between combatants and civilians. These practices have fueled a distorted narrative — one that, according to the research, misrepresents the nature of Israel’s military campaign.
Despite mounting evidence of inflated numbers, many major news outlets and agencies continue to echo Hamas’s figures.
Joshua Klein is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at
