Pro-Palestinian Crowd Silent as Hamas Admits the Truth About Its War with Israel
And this, ladies and gentlemen of the world, is precisely why one should never take Hamas at its word.
In November 2024, a wave of headlines emerged concerning the human toll in Gaza. The headlines were strikingly similar. CNN reported: “Around 70 percent of deaths in Gaza are women and children, says UN.” Al Jazeera echoed: “Nearly 70 percent of deaths in Gaza are women and children: UN.” Reuters added: “Gaza women, children are nearly 70 percent of verified war dead, UN rights office says.”
Since these figures were attributed to the U.N. Human Rights Office, they were intended to carry significant weight. However, as Reuters noted, the “verified” toll was 8,119—“a much lower number than the toll of more than 43,000 provided by Palestinian health authorities for the 13-month-old war.”
The UNHRO emphasized that it only counted “fatalities it has managed to verify with three sources.”
Yet, that didn’t stop many of these same media outlets from later broadcasting even more inflated numbers, with Palestinian health officials claiming 50,000 deaths. The phrase “Palestinian health authorities” itself serves as a sanitized reference to the Gaza Ministry of Health—meaning, in effect, it’s controlled by Hamas. And now, even those figures have proven to be wildly inaccurate.
According to a report published Tuesday by the U.K. Telegraph, Hamas quietly removed thousands of names from its casualty reports in a March update—including over a thousand children.
As the Jerusalem Post noted, this adjustment revealed that “[a]pproximately 72 percent of fatalities between the ages of 13-55 are men — the demographic category [which] aligns with Hamas combatants.”
And yet, from the pro-Palestinian camp? Silence.
Salo Aizenberg of the American nonprofit Honest Reporting was among the first to highlight the change.
“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 pointed out.
“These ‘deaths’ never happened. The numbers were falsified — again,” he wrote.
Andrew Fox, author of a December report for the Henry Jackson Society, which had already argued that Hamas was inflating the figures, explained that these deletions likely represented so-called “deaths” that could no longer be backed up with even the flimsiest of evidence.
“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,” Fox’s December report stated.
“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.”
Regarding Hamas’s revised March figures, Fox remarked, “We knew there were rafts of errors in their reporting.”
While he acknowledged that their “computer systems went down in November 2023, so it’s been challenging for them to report accurately,” he stressed that “the lists are so unreliable that the world’s media shouldn’t be quoting them as reliable.”
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 pointed out.
Oh.
The Hamas casualty lists, according to the Telegraph, contain names and ID numbers of supposed fatalities—but they can reportedly be edited by anyone with access to the Google form used to compile them.
Fox told the Telegraph that Hamas is likely “going 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.”
Regarding the 13-55 age group, Fox further noted, “We know that Hamas uses child soldiers, and these statistics show clearly that Israel is targeting fighting-aged men.”
Put simply, even Hamas realizes it can’t fool the world as easily as it can fool college activists.
And for those still keeping track: We’ve gone from the U.N., allegedly verifying in triplicate, claiming that 70 percent of Gaza’s fatalities were women and children—though the figures were already significantly lower than the original Palestinian claims—to discovering that the list has been revised so drastically that 72 percent of those killed were men of fighting age. Meanwhile, the United Nations appears to be merely parroting Hamas’s official line. Perhaps not as blindly as some in the media, but still credulously enough.
For any outside observers who needed a reminder: Hamas remains an untrustworthy source. More updates as events develop.
4o