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Short answer
Ever since the attack of Oct 7 and the retaliation Israel conducted since, The Hamas-controlled Gaza health ministry has been actively inflating civilian death tolls to vilify Israel. A study by the Henry Jackson Society revealed that the ministry overestimates deaths by including natural deaths and failing to distinguish between civilians and fighters.
Major news outlets have frequently cited these inflated figures without adequate scrutiny, taking the amount of dead at face value from Hamas. A study of media reports revealed a significant bias, with 84% failing to distinguish between combatant and civilian deaths and 98% citing the ministry’s figures, which were shown to be unreliable, containing errors and hiding combatant deaths.
Long answer
Ever since the beginning of the Gaza conflict, ignited by Hamas’s October 7th attack on Israel, the Gazan health ministry, controlled by Hamas, has been demonstrated to inflate the civilian death toll in the Gaza conflict to vilify Israel’ by portraying it as targeting innocent populations.A study by the Henry Jackson Society suggests that the ministry overestimated deaths by including natural deaths and failing to distinguish between civilians and fighters.While the ministry claims over 44,000 deaths, Israeli and American intelligence estimates place the number of Hamas fighters killed at around 17,000.
Major news outlets have frequently cited the Hamas Run MoH figures without adequate scrutiny, often presenting them as undisputed facts. For example, The Observer’s April 2024 headline “Gaza death toll passes 34,000 as Israel and Iran missile strikes grab global attention” relied on these figures. Similarly, the BBC’s August 2024 coverage extensively cited the MoH’s claim of over 40,000 deaths.
A group of international scholars analyzed 1,378 articles from major English-language news outlets between February and May 2024. They found that 84% of these publications failed to distinguish between combatant and civilian deaths, while 98% cited the Hamas MoH figures. Moreover, 19% of reports used MoH numbers without citing a source, suggesting their uncontested nature. Fewer than 2% of articles mentioned the unverifiability or controversy surrounding these figures, while Israeli statistics were questioned in half of the articles that included them.
The data has been found to contain errors, such as misclassifying ages and genders. It likely includes natural deaths, pre-war deaths, and deaths from Hamas’s own actions. The ministry’s methodology has been questioned, and its past reports have also been demonstrated to hide combatant deaths. Therefore, these numbers cannot be trusted.
