(TPS) Hamas has inflated Gaza’s casualty count by thousands, with men sometimes being registered as women or children, “potentially influencing international sentiment and media coverage,” according to a report released by the Henry Jackson Society, a British-based think tank. The study further found that 97% of all publications cited only Hamas figures.
“Casualty counting is a powerful weapon of information war and most sensitive information. These numbers influence what side people sympathize with, and in the end influence political decisions,” Israeli sociologist Tatiana Glezer, who lead the research on the media coverage of Gaza casualties, told The Press Service of Israel. HJS partnered with a group of scholars called Fifty Global, which Glezer spearheaded.
“A good journalistic practice would be to cite both sides, explaining limitations in their data and the fact that both figures are unverifiable,” Glezer insisted.
The Jackson Society said the inflated numbers “has led to a narrative where the Israel Defense Forces are portrayed as disproportionately targeting civilians, while the actual numbers suggest a significant proportion of the dead are combatants.”
The Hamas’ controlled Gaza Health Ministry estimates that more than 44,000 people were killed by Israel since October 7. The IDF has said that of all the casualties in Gaza, at least 17,000 are terrorists – the figure that is almost totally overlooked by the mainstream media. According to the HJS report, the majority of casualties are males between the ages of 15-45, adding that Hamas frequently lowered the ages of casualties by a year.
“Data analysis indicates that most fatalities are men aged 15–45, contradicting claims that civilian populations are being disproportionately targeted,” the HJS reported. “This age demographic aligns closely with the expected profile of combatants, further supported by spikes in deaths of men reported by family sources rather than hospitals. This evidence suggests that many fatalities classified as Civilian may be combatants, a distinction omitted from official reporting.”
Lumped together with the Gazan casualties attributed to Israel were cancer patients, victims of erroneous Hamas rocket fire, and a Gazan teenager shot dead by Hamas while waiting at an aid distribution point.
As to why Israeli military figures on the Hamas combatants killed were considered reliable, the HJS explained that the Israel Defense Forces are “better able to identify combatants than civilians because it targets combatants and invests resources in assessing enemy casualties.”
The report continued, “It is common for a military operation to know who the killed combatants are but not the civilians, due to the difficulties in counting the dead from air strikes and chaotic, dynamic close-quarter combat. The IDF is similar to comparable militaries and carries out post-mission battle damage assessments and team debriefs, where the numbers of enemy combatants killed are reported.”
Excluding Israel As a Source of Info
The study found that only 3% of all publications cited data from both Hamas and Israel, with the rest of the publications citing only Hamas data. Only one percent of the articles mentioned that Hamas’s figures are unverifiable or controversial.
Moreover, 19% of the articles presented Hamas data as “common knowledge,” meaning the figures were mentioned without any sourcing.
AP and The Washington Post did better than others, clarifying that Hamas does not differentiate between combatants and civilians in 39% and 44% of their publications respectively. BBC mentioned this in only about 1% of its articles, while Reuters did in about 2.5%.
Asked for reasons behind the imbalanced coverage, Glezer told TPS-IL, “One reason is that there is a narrative that was built for decades, and according to which it is good to sympathize with Palestinians. Another reason is how Israel tackles, or rather does not tackle, the problem. It’s ridiculously difficult for an independent journalist to get information from the IDF. It is not accessible on the website, and you cannot get an answer to your request.”
“As a result of the systematic lack of information on combatant casualties, a false narrative is formed that Israel has ‘killed more than 40,000 civilians’ in Gaza,” the report said.
Playing the Numbers
“These distortions primarily result from flawed methodologies, including reliance on media reports and incomplete family submissions and the inclusion of non-conflict-related deaths such as natural causes and accidental fatalities. The Ministry of Health, operating under Hamas, the perpetrators of the 7 October massacre in Israel, has systematically inflated the death toll by failing to distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths, over-reporting fatalities among women and children and even including individuals who died before the conflict began,” the HJS report concluded.
“This distortion of data not only creates a misleading picture of the conflict but also raises significant concerns about the credibility of the numbers being reported across the world.”
However, Israeli officials aren’t always in a position in to offer numbers to counter Hamas, Dr. Adi Schwartz, a research fellow at the Misgav Institute in Jerusalem and a fellow at the Ben-Gurion Institute at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, told TPS-IL in April.
“Israel doesn’t give a ‘counter-number’ because it’s impossible to know. Israel has to maintain its credibility, but Hamas does not,” he said.
Meanwhile, the number of Gaza casualties is exploited by anti-Israel organizations. “When the BDS [Boycott Divestment and Sanctions] movement sent letters to the US universities demanding to stop collaboration with Israel, the numbers of casualties in Gaza were mentioned in the very first paragraph. Of course, the figures were taken from Hamas,” Glezer told TPS-IL.
“Besides that, the casualties numbers influence the judicial decisions. Hamas numbers on casualties made base for the South African claims of genocide in Gaza. The difference between the terrorists and the civilians was not made.”
Glezer, who immigrated to Israel from Russia in 2022, told TPS-IL her research was born out of frustration with CNN, which she had trusted for years leading up to the war.
“And then the war in Israel began on October 7, and I watched CNN and could not believe my own eyes,” she recalled. “The wording, the reliance on Hamas data – it all felt weird. I decided to look at other media.”
She formed an expert team of around 50 volunteers around the world. Between February-May 2024, they indexed 1,378 articles mentioning Gazan casualty figures published online at CNN, BBC News, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Reuters, Associated Press, and ABC News.
Each quote was independently coded by two researchers, with a third researcher reviewing and verifying the results. All the initial data of the research is available online and can be verified. “It was important for us to adjust to the standards of scientific research,’ said Glezer. ‘We excluded from the research all the information that requires interpretation, and focused only on things that you can not argue about – whether the IDF data is listed as a source, and whether the differentiation between combatants and civilians is made.’
At least 1,200 people were killed, and 252 Israelis and foreigners were taken hostage in Hamas’s attacks on Israeli communities near the Gaza border on October 7. Of the 97 remaining hostages, more than 30 have been declared dead. Hamas has also been holding captive two Israeli civilians since 2014 and 2015, and the bodies of two soldiers killed in 2014.
