New report challenges accuracy of Hamas' Gaza death toll.

The Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health has been accused of inflating casualty tallies during the conflict in Gaza, and the media has largely accepted these numbers without scrutiny.

The Henry Jackson Society (HJS) discovered "inaccuracies and distortion" in the data collection process of the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health (MoH), resulting in a "misleading picture of the conflict." Additionally, the study found that journalists worldwide have spread misleading MoH data without acknowledging its flaws or providing alternative information from Israeli sources.

Andrew Fox, a fellow at HJS, stated that his team's research is based on casualty figures released by the MoH through Telegram and the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Despite the changeable MoH data being difficult to interrogate, Fox and his team have been able to examine segments of the reporting.

Gaza health authorities reported more than 45,000 deaths on Tuesday.

The ministry's reporting has long indicated that women and children make up more than half of the war dead in Gaza, leading to accusations that Israel intentionally targets civilians.

If Israel was killing indiscriminately, you would expect deaths to roughly match the demographic proportions pre-war, according to Fox. At the time, adult men made up around 26% of the Gazan population. However, the number of adult males that have died is vastly in excess of 26%.

Fox and his team discovered that casualty entries were being recorded incorrectly, resulting in an artificial increase in the number of women and children reported as killed. This error included listing people with male names as females and recording grown adults as young children.

The breakdown of networks in November 2023 has led to the discovery of biases in the data analysis of casualty figures by category. There are three categories of entries in the MoH's casualty figures: hospital entries, family submissions, and media sources. The veracity of media sources has been questioned by researchers such as Dr. David Adesnik, vice president of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Hospital-reported casualties have a higher percentage of women and children than those reported by family members, according to an analysis of gender breakdowns among these groupings.

Despite the fact that approximately 5,000 natural deaths occur in Gaza annually, a study has revealed that the Ministry of Health (MoH) casualty figures do not account for these deaths. Additionally, the study claims that the MoH's count fails to exclude deaths that are not directly linked to Israeli military action. This includes individuals who were reportedly killed by Hamas, such as 13-year-old Ahmed Shaddad Halmy Brikeh, who was mistakenly listed as a casualty in August 2023 despite reports indicating that he had been shot dead by Hamas while trying to obtain food from an aid shipment in December 2023. Furthermore, the study found that the MoH's casualty figures exclude individuals who were killed by Hamas' rockets, which fell short within the Gaza strip between October 2023 and July 2024, resulting in approximately 1,750 deaths.

Individuals who died before the conflict began were mistakenly included in MoH casualty counts, and at least three cancer patients whose names were intended to leave Gaza for treatment in April were mistakenly listed as dead in March.

The ministry does not differentiate between combatants and civilians in its casualty figures. While the study suggests that Israeli forces have killed approximately 17,000 Hamas terrorists, Fox claims that his research indicates the death toll may be as high as 22,000 members of Hamas. He states that his research supports the fact that around 15,000 of the dead in Gaza are women and children, and 7,500 are non-combatant adult males.

"Gathering such lists in a war zone is a highly difficult task," Fox acknowledged, but he emphasized that the MoH's errors, whether unintentional or intentional, demonstrate the institution's "complete unreliability."

Although the Henry Jackson Society's survey of reporting on the conflict found that 98% of media organizations used fatality data from the MoH, only 5% cited Israeli figures. Fox found that fewer than one in 50 articles about the conflict mentioned the unverifiability or controversy of the MoH's figures, while Israeli statistics were questioned in half of the few articles that included them.

Fox highlighted an article from a British broadcaster that he deemed "biased" and claimed to have more than 45,000 deaths in Gaza. The article did not provide a breakdown of the numbers of combatants and civilians, and did not question the accuracy of MoH reporting. Instead, it simply parroted MoH claims, stating that women and children accounted for more than half of the fatalities.

Fox stated that it's a great example of what we've written in the report,