Hamas quietly cuts thousands from its casualty war figures

Hamas’s March 2025 casualty update has dropped 3,400 fully ‘identified’ deaths, listed in its 2024 reports – including 1,080 children – according to the non-profit group Honest Reporting.

Hamas has quietly dropped thousands of deaths from its Gaza war casualty figures, including those of women and children, it has emerged.

Salo Aizenberg, from the US-based non-profit organisation Honest Reporting, said Hamas’s March 2025 casualty update had removed thousands of people it previously listed as having been killed last year, the UK Telegraph reports.

“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. These ‘deaths’ never happened. The numbers were falsified – again,” Mr Aizenberg wrote.

A report by the Henry Jackson Society in December said the number of civilians killed in the nearly 18 month long war had probably been inflated by Hamas in order to portray Israel as deliberately targeting innocent people.

“This report raises serious concerns that the Gaza Ministry of Health figures have been overstated,” the Henry Jackson Society said on its website. “The data behind their figures contains natural deaths, deaths from before this conflict began and deaths of those killed by Hamas itself; it contains no mention of Hamas combatant fatalities; and it overstates the number of women and children killed.”

The report went on to list serious errors in the Ministry of Health figures, including a 22-year-old registered as a four-year-old, a 31-year-old registered as a one-year-old and several men with male first names registered as female – thus artificially increasing the numbers of women and children reported killed.

The lists also include people who died before the war and people who died from attacks by Hamas rather than the Israel Defence Forces, the reports says.

“They likely include around 5,000 natural deaths per year, including cancer patients who were listed by the Ministry for hospital treatment after they had already appeared on fatality lists. Hamas also claimed hundreds of fatalities from attacks which turned out to be misfired rocket launches by Gaza factions,” the report added.

The report’s data analysis also indicated most fatalities were men aged 15 – 45, which aligns with the profile of combatants – contradicting Ministry of Health claims that the civilian population was being disproportionately targeted.

“This evidence suggests that many fatalities classified as civilian may be combatants, a distinction omitted from official reporting,” the report states.

Andrew Fox, the author of the Henry Jackson society report, told The Telegraph the latest deletions reported by Honest Reporting are likely to have been an attempt by Hamas to retain credibility.

“We knew there were rafts of errors in their reporting,” Mr Fox said. “There’s a reasonable explanation in that their computer systems went down in November 2023, so it’s been challenging for them to report accurately, but the lists are so unreliable that the world’s media shouldn’t be quoting them as reliable.”

He added: “Salo’s research would be looking for names that were on previous lists but have now disappeared.

“Hamas releases lists as PDFs, so it’s harder to do comparisons but we transfer names to an Excel sheet to do a mass comparison this way.”

Mr Fox’s report examined 1,378 articles from major English-language newspapers and media outlets, including The New York Times, The Guardian, and the Australian ABC and found that in a four-month period, 84 per cent of the publications did not make the distinction in total numbers between combatant and civilian deaths.

The revised numbers came as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the military was establishing a new security corridor across the Gaza Strip to pressure Hamas, suggesting it would cut off the southern city of Rafah, which Israel has ordered evacuated, from the rest of the Palestinian territory.

The announcement came after Mr Netanyahu's defence minister said that Israel would seize large areas of Gaza and add them to its so-called security zones. A wave of Israeli strikes, meanwhile, killed more than 40 Palestinians, nearly half of them women and children, according to Palestinian health officials.

Israel has vowed to escalate the nearly 18-month war with Hamas until the militant group returns dozens of remaining hostages, disarms and leaves the territory. Israel ended a ceasefire in March and has imposed a month-long halt on all imports of food, fuel and humanitarian aid.

Mr Netanyahu described the new axis as the Morag corridor, using the name of a Jewish settlement that once stood between Rafah and Khan Younis, suggesting it would run between the two southern cities. He said it would be "a second Philadelphi corridor " referring to the Gaza side of the border with Egypt further south, which has been under Israeli control since last May.

Israel has reasserted control over the Netzarim corridor, also named for a former settlement, that cuts off the northern third of Gaza, including Gaza City, from the rest of the narrow coastal strip. Both of the existing corridors run from the Israeli border to the Mediterranean Sea.

“We are cutting up the strip, and we are increasing the pressure step by step, so that they will give us our hostages,” Mr Netanyahu said.

In northern Gaza, an Israeli air strike hit a UN building in the built-up Jabaliya refugee camp, killing 15 people, including nine children and two women, according to the Indonesian Hospital. The Israeli military said it struck Hamas militants in a command and control centre.

More than 60 per cent of Gaza is now considered a “no-go” zone because of Israeli evacuation orders, according to Olga Cherevko, a spokesperson for the U.N. humanitarian aid office. Hundreds of thousands people are living in squalid tent camps along the coast or in the ruins of their destroyed homes.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz had earlier said Israel would seize “large areas” and add them to its security zones, apparently referring to an existing buffer zone along Gaza's entire perimeter. He called on Gaza residents to “expel Hamas and return all the hostages,” saying “this is the only way to end the war.”

On Sunday, Mr Netanyahu said Israel plans to maintain overall security control of Gaza after the war and implement President Donald Trump's proposal to resettle much of its population elsewhere through what the Israeli leader referred to as “voluntary emigration.” Palestinians have rejected the plan, viewing it as expulsion from their homeland after Israel's offensive left much of it uninhabitable, and human rights experts say implementing the plan would likely violate international law.

Hamas has said it will only release the remaining 59 hostages — 24 of whom are believed to be alive — in exchange for the release of more Palestinian prisoners, a lasting ceasefire and an Israeli pullout. The group has rejected demands that it lay down its arms or leave the territory.

The decision to resume the war has fuelled protests in Israel, where many fear it has put the hostages at grave risk and are calling for another ceasefire and exchange with Hamas.

The Hostage Families Forum, which represents most captives’ families, said they were “horrified to wake up this morning to the Defense Minister’s announcement about expanding military operations in Gaza.” The group called on the Trump administration, which took credit for brokering the ceasefire but has supported Israel's decision to end it, to do everything possible to free the remaining captives.

“Our highest priority must be an immediate deal to bring ALL hostages back home — the living for rehabilitation and those killed for proper burial — and end this war,” the group said.

In addition to the 15 killed in northern Gaza, Israeli air strikes overnight into Wednesday killed another 28 people across the territory, according to local hospitals. The Nasser Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis said the dead included five women, one of them pregnant, and two children.

Israel says it targets only militants and makes every effort to spare civilians, blaming Hamas for their deaths because the militants operate in densely populated areas.

However the discovery of a mass grave in Rafah where the bodies of 15 medics were found after the Israeli army fired on ambulances illustrates the “war without limits” that Israel is leading in Gaza, a UN aid official said Wednesday.

“It was shocking” to see medical workers “still in their uniforms, still wearing gloves, killed while trying to save lives,” said Jonathan Whittall, head of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in the Palestinian territories.

“The ambulances were hit one by one,” he said in a video conference after a mission to Gaza uncovered the mass grave. Of the 15 bodies, eight were members of the Palestinian Red Crescent and one was from the United Nations.

UN chief Antonio Guterres also expressed revulsion Wednesday at the killings. “The secretary-general is shocked by the attacks of the Israeli army on a medical and emergency convoy on March 23 resulting in the killings of 15 medical personnel and humanitarian workers in Gaza,” spokesman Stephane Dujarric told a briefing.

AP, AFP