As mainstream press, international organizations, and governments have taken as truth the casualty statistics for the war in Gaza reported by the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry, a new study reviewed by the Sun suggests the data they have relied on is systematically flawed. 

“These casualty lists are totally unreliable,” one of the report’s authors, Andrew Fox, tells the Sun. “From methodology, to mistakes and flaws in the data — it just shouldn’t be used by the world’s media.” 

The death toll reported by the Gaza health ministry since the start of the war exceeds 44,000. It’s a figure that has been widely reported in the press and has served to fuel the narrative that the Israel Defense Forces is disproportionately targeting civilians. However, the number, researchers from the Henry Jackson Society charge, is riddled with statistical anomalies and inaccuracies. 

The death toll, according to the report, fails to distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths. Israeli and American intelligence estimate the latter to be around 17,000. This fact alone, the researchers claim, has “led to a narrative where the IDF is portrayed as disproportionately targeting civilians, while the actual numbers suggest a significant proportion of the dead are combatants.” 

The report further suggests that the ministry inflates the number of female and child fatalities by routinely recording dead males as women or children. In August of 2024 alone, 103 individuals who were recorded under the female fatality list had male names, like Mohammed, according to the report.

In other cases, the ministry revised downward the ages of victims. When the researchers compared the first 1,000 names on the population registries for October 2023 and July 2024, they found that more than 100 individuals had turned one year younger. Some age misclassifications were more drastic: researchers found that an individual aged 22 was listed as a four-year-old and a 31-year-old was listed as an infant. 

“This misclassification,” the authors note, “contributes to the narrative that civilian populations, particularly women and children, bear the brunt of the conflict, potentially influencing international sentiment and media coverage.” In reality, however, data suggest that the majority of those who have died in the conflict are exactly what one would expect — fighting-aged males between the ages of 15 and 45.

The death toll also appears to include individuals whose deaths were unrelated to the war, including some 5,000 natural deaths. The researchers found that cancer patients, who had been registered as receiving treatment elsewhere, were included on war fatality lists. 

Mr. Fox, who served for 16 years in the British army’s Parachute Regiment and served in Afghanistan with American Special Forces, isn’t Jewish or Israeli. He felt compelled to spearhead the research effort because “nothing that I was seeing in Gaza looked like the hysterical false descriptions that seemed to dominate the narrative,” he tells the Sun. “The death toll just didn’t add up.” 

After analyzing more than a thousand articles from leading English-language outlets, the researchers found those outlets “almost entirely” excluded combatant fatalities from their reported casualty totals, and relied overwhelmingly on data from Hamas-controlled sources while underplaying information from Israeli sources. 

This technique has long been used by Hamas. After Operation Cast Lead, Hamas initially claimed that 95 percent of fatalities were civilians. This figure was criticized and later revised down to acknowledge that nearly half were combatants. 

“I expected the media stats to be bad,” Mr. Fox tells the Sun, “but I didn’t expect them to be as bad as they are.” 

While 98 percent of the articles included in the analysis cited figures from the Hamas-run health ministry, fewer than 2 percent acknowledged that the statistics were unverifiable or contested. Only 3 percent of articles even bothered to include the number of combatants in reported fatality totals. The lax scrutiny, however, didn’t extend to the data supplied by Israeli sources — 50 percent of articles which cited Israeli-sourced statistics questioned their credibility.  

Meanwhile, the press has faced little pushback from international organizations, like the United Nations, which also tend to cite health ministry statistics. “This failure means that the narrative has been distorted into something that misrepresents the situation in Gaza. This affects public opinion, influences policy-making and has broader implications for international relations and conflict resolution,” the authors write. 

Will the new report inspire a reckoning within the global press and international institutions? Mr. Fox, for one, is “hopeful” but “not in expectation,” he tells the Sun. “Israel hasn’t really fought the war on the information side of things,” he adds. “The pro-Palestinian argument runs on emotion, whereas the Israelis rely on pure fact.”