The numbers don’t lie, but Hamas does

There’s something disarmingly simple about numbers, which is that they carry a veneer of objectivity. So, when the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry claimed that 70 per cent of the total dead by Israeli military action in the Strip were women and children, much of the world accepted the figure at face value. But, like many things in this war, these numbers tell a story that isn’t quite true.

A new report from the UK-based Henry Jackson Society, a national security think tank, lays out through forensic analysis of casualty data what many suspected but few could prove: that Hamas manipulated its own death tolls in order to weaponise them.

This is not to say civilian deaths did not occur. They did, in horrifying numbers, and every death, regardless of religion or nationality is a tragedy. But, unlike its enemy, the IDF is bound by moral and legal restraint. Those who attempt to downplay or deny that there have been any civilian casualties, however, appear to have forgotten the three Israeli hostages mistakenly killed by Israeli soldiers in Gaza, shot dead while holding a white cloth and screaming ‘help.’ The IDF may take the utmost precaution, but no amount of safeguarding can save an army constantly on edge.

The scale and nature of the Gazan civilian deaths, though, were obfuscated with almost surgical precision: when Israeli troops entered Khan Yunis, for example, raw hospital records show that men of combat age – a quarter of Gaza’s population – made up nearly two-thirds of the dead. Women and children, by contrast, were underrepresented relative to their population share. The overall civilian casualty rate hovered closer to 50 per cent, not the endlessly repeated 70; still high, but far from Hamas’ manufactured narrative.

Civilian casualties are tragic in any war. But to understand the 50% figure in context, compare it to other conflicts: the Korean War led to between 2 to 4 million civilian casualties, a 50% to 67% civilian casualty rate; the Iraq War of 2003-2011 caused around 186,901-210,296 civilian deaths, a 67% civilian casualty rate; and the Syrian civil war left approximately 306,887 civilians dead between March 2011 and March 2021 alone out of between 580,000 and 656,493, a rate of just above 50%.

But by excluding many adult males from the list, selectively releasing data, and removing even known Hamas operatives from public casualty records, the illusion of indiscriminate slaughter was maintained. The global audience, primed to believe the worst, stuck with it.

It didn’t help that much of the Western media – the BBC, CNN and The Guardian among them – reported these Hamas numbers uncritically, with even UN agencies citing them. But this wasn’t accidental: Hamas understood that while it couldn’t defeat Israel on the battlefield, it could certainly shift the terms of debate, reframing the war entirely from one triggered by the mass slaughter of Israelis on October 7, 2023 – men, women and children – to warfare sustained purely by Israeli cruelty.

Even the chaos of war was co-opted: the Gaza Health Ministry blurred the lines between civilians and combatants and between disease deaths and battlefield casualties. At times, placeholder names were entered; at others, deaths went unverified or were double-counted. Epidemiological models based on these flawed inputs predicted nightmarish trolls that never materialised, but the headlines had already run: Gaza is a children’s graveyard.

Western doctors who visited, often in good faith, reported what they saw in the overwhelmed wards. But even those accounts didn’t always seem to quite hold up against the data. One medic claimed that up to 75% of patients were under elementary school age, yet the injury records from the same hospital told a different story: children made up just 16-20 per cent of the total, while adult men, including fighters, accounted for nearly 60%.

None of this changes the reality of suffering, but it does reframe the moral geometry: we now know that Hamas turned lies into policy, winning not solely Western sympathy, but in some cases, Western support.

The world, though, is only just catching up. Following months of citing Hamas numbers, even UN officials have begun to express quiet doubts. The Gaza Health Ministry, once prolific with daily updates, has grown increasingly opaque, and disaggregated data is now becoming progressively harder to find. But many of the most lurid early claims have metastasised into common knowledge, having been baked into syllabi and parliamentary debates. The lie lives longer than the correction, especially when the correction is rarely made.

Hamas knew this. The narrative of Israel as the colonial machine massacring the innocent instead of responding to one of the worst pogroms in Jewish history is now so deeply embedded that even Israeli efforts to limit harm, as documented in the raw data, are practically invisible. In any other war, the fact that men of fighting age were disproportionately killed would be read as evidence of targeting discipline. Here it is ignored.

The irony is that this has long been Hamas’ way of operating. Its combatants fight from hospitals, store weapons in schools, and fire rockets from residential buildings. Hamas has engineered a kind of postmodern propaganda campaign, and the world, whether knowingly or not, has played its part.

What happens next is unclear. But one thing is certain: when the story of this war is told, the casualty count will be a narrative, not simply a number. And narratives, unlike bodies, do not decay; they linger.