The mainstream media continues to quote the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza as their source for casualty figures.
For instance, just yesterday, AP News reported:
More than 48,000 Palestinians in Gaza, mostly women and children, have been killed in the ensuing conflict, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants.
This alone is a dereliction of their duty to be objective journalists, especially considering they do not mention the ministry is Hamas-run.
But it is even worse than that.
Gaza’s Health Ministry have been releasing the names and IDs of Gazans allegedly killed. Because this information was presented in PDFs, they were difficult to analyze until now. But a group called Airwars built a tool to search these lists.
According to Prof Gerald M Steinberg of NGO Monitor, Airwars “is a zero-credibility advocacy NGO.”
Lots of tech-like “CIS” bells and whistles, no verifiable data, as this fake “documentation” highlights. The input is all Hamas.
Beyond the sheer common sense dictating that a bloodthirsty terror organization cannot be trusted, and will and does lie (and have even admitted in the past that their figures are inaccurate), Twitter/X user Aizenberg has shown how the Hamas figures are inflated.
But I thought I would anyway take the Airwars tool based on the Hamas data, and do an analysis to see what I would discover.
So I used their tool to download a CSV file of the data, and used pivot tables to analyze deeper.
Problems With The Casualty List
Before I present my findings, I should mention that there are real problems with the list – in addition to what is mentioned above.
For instance, the list includes 1,066 people of age 0. I thought perhaps they meant by this babies who have not yet reached one year of age. But if this was the case, then the National IDs of these babies would be the largest numbers. But as you can see, this is not the case:
Furthermore, the list does not just include those declared dead by the Ministry of Health but also “Relative Self-Reports”, and “Notification from the victim’s family.” In other words, anyone claiming their family member is dead – without any proof – is included (not that the Ministry of Health’s declaration is itself trustworthy).
Findings
According to the flawed and biased-towards-Hamas casualty figures, which are no doubt inflated, approximately 46,000 Gazans have been killed, even below the 48,000 reported by AP.
But looking deeper, if Israel was indiscriminately killing Gazans, one could expect the casualty demographics to somewhat mirror the overall demographics of Gaza. This is not the case.
While Gaza’s population is roughly 50% female vs 50% male, 65% of the casualties have been male vs 35% female.
Given males are more likely to be terrorists, this could be indicative of the IDF specifically targeting terrorists.
But this is only part of the story. Age is also a factor. And here, we have a similar story:
Way less children than expected have been killed even according to the Hamas numbers, and way more than expected in the “terrorist” age bracket of 25-54 have been killed.
Note I picked these specific age bands because those were the only ones I could find regarding the age demographics of Gaza (using ChatGPT). But I have a different age breakdown for the next part of my analysis:
- 0-16: Children, not likely to be terrorists (although there have been kids in this age group found to be active terrorists in the past)
- 17-40: Most likely to be active terrorists
- 41-50: Less likely, but could still include active terrorists
- 51-60: Even less likely, but could still include active terrorists
- 61+: Even less likely to be active terrorists, but this age bracket does include terror leaders such as Sinwar and Haniyeh
Breaking down the fatalities according to these age groups and gender:
we see that the demographic most likely to include active terrorists – male Gazans between 17-40 – comprise the group with the most killed. By far.
And while these figures do show the 0-16 age bracket as the next largest, when compared to the percentage of Gaza these kids comprise (around 45%), we again can conclude that even these biased numbers support the contention that the IDF has been targeting terrorists and not civilians.
Given Hamas have been operating in populated areas and deliberately using civilians as human shields, even these biased numbers cannot hide the fact that the IDF has been trying to avoid civilian casualties – and that accusations of a genocide are simply ridiculous.
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