Report lays bare Hamas’s fear campaign to silence mentions of its Gaza combat fatalities
Terror group obfuscates information about slain operatives, knowing that by focusing only on civilians, it can ensure the world’s support as it fights against Israel
Throughout its war against Israel in Gaza, Hamas has refrained from publishing the names of its slain operatives, according to a report published Tuesday that delved into the terror group’s intimidation campaign aimed at barring Gazans from any mention of such fatalities.
The report, published by the Haaretz daily newspaper, stated that despite no formal ban having been implemented that would prevent Gazans from sharing the names of terror operatives killed by Israeli troops, an unwritten rule upheld in the Palestinian enclave prevents them from doing so.
Citing unnamed residents of the Gaza Strip, the report stated that the unofficial rule is implemented to such a degree that even family members of slain operatives will refrain from public mourning.
“There is fear to talk publicly about Hamas operatives, including operatives who have been killed,” one Gaza resident told Haaretz, explaining that there was fear of being branded a “traitor” or “collaborator” and of being harassed by the terror group.
The report comes in the midst of Israel’s ongoing war against the terror organization following the October 7 onslaught on southern Israel that left 1,200 dead and 251 taken hostage — and as Israel faces heavy international criticism over the level of reported civilian casualties in the Gaza Strip.
The resident, identified by Haaretz under the pseudonym Issam, said that since the start of the war with Israel, the pressure from Hamas not to publish the names of its operatives has increased significantly, and to do so would be considered treasonous.
As such, news of their deaths are only passed on by word of mouth, he said.
“The prevailing assumption on the streets is that if the names of slain gunmen are published, people around the world will identify less strongly with the Gazans’ suffering, and this will give legitimacy to bombing Gaza,” a second resident, pseudonymized as Adnan, was quoted as saying. “As long as there are clips and stories about the civilian population, nobody says a thing. But if anyone dares to criticize Hamas or to mention the name of a slain fighter, they will call them a traitor and treat them as such.”
While many in Gaza disagree with Hamas’s policy of obfuscation, they don’t have any real choice but to go along with it, Adnan said.
“We’re in a state of war and the population is suffering,” he explained. “A lot of people are having a very difficult time and they need support and assistance. There is no desire to get into it with Hamas.”
The lack of clarity that shrouds Hamas’s Gaza operations is in direct contrast to the terror group’s strategy in the West Bank, where it proudly publishes the names of its members killed by the IDF. It is also in direct opposition to the strategy of Hezbollah in Lebanon, which maintains a detailed list of that terror group’s fatalities in the near-daily cross-border skirmishes since October.
The war with Israel is “a war of survival also for Hamas’s image around the world,” a third source told Haaretz. “When armed operatives aren’t mentioned, when their deaths aren’t mentioned, they don’t exist in the discourse.”
In addition to fear of harassment at the hands of Hamas should a family member of a slain operative publicly share information about their death, one Gaza resident said the family members also fear harassment from Israeli forces.
Speaking to Haaretz, Bushra (not her real name) said that the fog is so dense that even immediate relatives of Hamas operatives may not know what their loved ones are doing, even after they are killed in the fighting.
“The families are displaced, moving from place to place. The children who are Hamas operatives leave their homes ahead of time and leave no information about their whereabouts,” she said. “The news that they’ve been killed spreads from one person to another until it reaches their parents.”
Despite this, the report said Gazans still know how to get by under such circumstances, and have their own system of finding out when a terror operative has been killed, including by scouring social media or messaging applications.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 40,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far, yet the ministry’s toll cannot be verified, nor does it differentiate between civilians and fighters.
Israel, for its part, says it has killed some 17,000 combatants in battle and another 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on October 7. It has said it seeks to minimize civilian fatalities and stresses that Hamas uses Gaza’s civilians as human shields, fighting from civilian areas including homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques.
In June, an Associated Press analysis of Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry data showed that the proportion of Palestinian women and children being killed in the Israel-Hamas war appeared to have declined sharply.
This trend coincided with Israel’s changing battlefield tactics and contradicted the Hamas-run ministry’s own public statements, and was considered significant because the death rate for women and children is the best available proxy for civilian casualties in the conflict.
In October, when the war began, the purported death rate of women and children was above 60 percent. In April, it was below 40%. Yet the shift went unnoticed for months by the United Nations and much of the media, and the Gazan health ministry made no effort to set the record straight.
