Hamas fatality figures for Gaza war are ‘clear disinformation,’ according to new study
In contast to Hamas claims, paper finds female and child fatalities are underrepresented relative to their proportion of the Strip’s general population, demonstrating IDF efforts to avoid civilian casualties
Jeremy Sharon is The Times of Israel’s legal affairs and settlements reporter
The percentage of women and children killed in Gaza during the course of Israel’s war against Hamas following the October 7 atrocities is far lower than claimed by the terror group’s media propaganda agency, according to a new study.
The study found that despite claims by Hamas’s Government Media Office that some 70 percent of fatalities were women and children, figures provided by the Gaza Ministry of Health showed the real rate to be 51%.
The new paper, published by professors Lewi Stone and Gregory Rose, argues that the relatively lower rate of women and children fatalities, combined with the high percentage of women and children in the general Gaza population, demonstrates that the IDF has taken systematic measures to avoid civilian casualties.
It also used a case study of the IDF’s campaign in the southern Gazan city of Khan Younis in 2024 to show that the percentage of women and children killed during the operation was 34% of the total to further underline this claim.
The two authors accused Hamas’s Government Media Office of distorting the data provided by the Gazan Ministry of Heath, and said it “clearly engaged in disinformation to prosecute the Hamas wartime narrative, the central theme of which is that the IDF deliberately commits war atrocities.”
Stone is a professor of Mathematical Epidemiology at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, while Rose is an honorary professor of law at the University of Wollongong, Australia. Their paper was published by the Henry Jackson Society think tank based in London.
The study is based on data collated by the Gaza Ministry of Health through a centralized and computerized database at Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.
In March 2025, the Hamas-controlled Gaza Ministry of Health published a list of 50,021 fatalities during the war. The list does not differentiate between combatants and civilians, or those who were killed by Hamas’s own combat actions.
While refusing to disclose how many fatalities were combatants, the Hamas Government Media Office has consistently claimed that some 70 percent of those killed during the war were women and children, using the category as a proxy for non-combatants, in order to allege that the IDF indiscriminately kills Palestinian civilians.
But Stone and Rose’s analysis of the Ministry of Health list found that in reality the proportion of female and child fatalities in the war was just under 51%.
By going through the list of 50,021 fatalities listed, they found 9,790 were adult women 18 years old and over, while 15,613 were children (boys and girls) under the age of 18, giving a total of 25,403 in the women and children category. This represented 50.8% of all fatalities during the war.
The study also used data obtained by a research group at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, which published the dates of death of all 28,185 identified fatalities in the war up until 30 June 2024, to evaluate the rate of deaths of women and children in specific operations such as in Khan Younis, and to show the declining level of fatalities as the war progressed.
Using this data, Stone and Rose provided a detailed breakdown of fatalities by age and sex during the IDF’s operation in Khan Younis from January to May 2024.
The study identified 2,154 fatalities in the Khan Younis operation, of which 1,411 were adult men, over the age of 18, or 65.5%.
The percentage of women and children killed during that operation was 34.5%.
Additionally, the age brackets for boys and men aged of 15 to 20, 20 to 25, 25 to 30 and 35 to 40 — the most likely age ranges for combatants — were all significantly over represented in the total number of fatalities during the Khan Younis operation.
Of the child fatalities, 188 were female, or some 9% of the total casualties in the Khan Younis operation, compared to 278 male child fatalities, or 13%.
Stone and Rose stated that the higher rate of male child fatalities suggested that a “substantial portion” of boys under the age of 18 were engaged in combat roles during the war.
The study also looked at the rate of fatalities during the course of the war, finding that whereas the percentage of women and children killed in October 2023 was 62%, it dropped to 45% in January 2024, and fluctuated around that level thereafter.
“This is a strong signal that IDF ground troops were attempting to target combatants despite the difficulties of conditions of urban warfare,” Stone and Rose contended.
The authors also pointed out that Hamas does not identify fatalities caused by Gaza-based terror groups’ failed attacks, such as the infamous Al-Ahli Hospital incident in October 2023.
In addition, a certain number of the 9,000 natural deaths which would be expected to have occurred in Gaza since October 2023 have also been included in the general fatality count for the war.
And they noted that many Hamas combatants who have been recorded elsewhere as having been killed were not included in the list of the 50,000 Gazans the Ministry of Health said died during the war.
The suppression of Hamas’s combatant fatalities has served to further “inflate” the percentage of women and children killed as a total of the overall number of fatalities, and increase the distorted picture of civilian casualties, Stone and Rose pointed out.
“We do not doubt that a large number of civilians have tragically lost their lives in this conflict, and it is deeply concerning to us,” the two researchers stated.
They asserted however that Hamas’s declarations that Israel was committing “genocide” in Gaza “was inconsistent with its own datasets,” and that “doctoring” of the data was possible because many of the medical directors in the Gazan Ministry of Health and hospital system were controlled by Hamas.
“Sadly, when Hamas’s narratives were accepted and amplified without any forensic critique, to be broadcast enthusiastically by agenda-driven activists, much of the world public was deceived.”
The Times of Israel Community.