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In Israel’s war with Hamas, the latter has won the battle to control information. This strategic victory will have enduring consequences.
Control of information has always been essential in wartime. Disinformation is a tool for surprises, ruses, hybrid attacks, disorientation, distraction and demoralisation. It is always prominent during active hostilities and is also used in the “grey zone” phase prior to firing the first shot. In its hybrid warfare strategy, Hamas and its allies mobilised disinformation on Gazan civilian suffering into global media, diplomacy, governments, educational institutions and law courts to attack the fabric of Israeli society.
There is no doubt that civilians have suffered grievously in this conflict, and each loss is a tragedy. However, accurately determining the proportion of civilians among the dead is a critical and necessary task – one that Hamas has controlled as a powerful weapon. Some may argue that questioning Gaza’s casualty figures diminishes the human suffering of war. On the contrary. The implications of inaccurate or false figures are profoundly cynical and immoral.
Numbers are assumed to be objective, but in conflicts such as this, they are anything but. They are uncertain, contestable, withheld, selected, manipulated, falsified and spun. Earlier research, including our own in 2024, uncovered major fraud in Hamas’s casualty statistics for women and children, after which UN agencies became more cautious in quoting exaggerated Hamas daily figures and Hamas itself altered its reporting to become opaquer.
In our new report for the Henry Jackson Society, we provide statistical analysis demonstrating how Hamas weaponised fatality numbers. The Hamas-run Ministry of Health Information Centre and Government Media Office provided curated casualty data for international consumption to fit Hamas’s wartime narrative. Our rigorous analysis of Hamas’ reported casualty figures reveals significant inconsistencies and a calculated effort to distort reality and shape the narrative of the conflict. When compared to Hamas’ public statements, the raw data from published Gazan hospital records yields insights that reveals Hamas’s methods of disinformation. No doubt, in the future, there will be less such raw data made available.
Our report demonstrates that, while war is chaotic, Hamas’s manipulation of statistics has been anything but random. Patterns within the data itself reveal a systematic effort to obscure the number of combatants killed and blur the lines between civilian and combatant deaths, to selectively release civilian casualty information, to issue false headline data, to inflate civilian death tolls and to create an image of overwhelming victimhood. Despite this, the unreported underlying raw data nevertheless traces the significant impacts of Israeli troops efforts to limit harm to civilians.
The Hamas Media Office’s claims of women and child casualties have routinely exceeded those of the Ministry, even though supposedly based upon the Ministry’s figures. Both have regularly claimed in headline data that 70 per cent of casualties are women and children, despite Gazan underlying casualty data records contradicting this assertion. The exaggerated women and child casualty numbers have been partly achieved by the exclusion of large numbers of men, which reverses the real trends over time for key variables.
In fact, women and child casualty rates have been well below 70 per cent, certainly after ground troops entered and dominated the fighting, following the first, solely aerial, phase of the war. Across the war so far, women and children comprise about half of all casualties despite comprising three quarters of the Gazan population. A simple calculation shows that 70 per cent (or 70:30) is 2.33 times more deadly for women and children, when compared to males, than a rate of 50 per cent (or 1:1).
Surprisingly, we found that in some battlespaces, women and child casualty rates were down to about 35 per cent, such as during the armed conflict in Khan Yunis during the first four months of 2024, where casualty rates for men of combat age were over-represented nearly fivefold. We show this in the figure below, plotted from the raw data.
Figure: Distribution by age of all casualties, male (blue) and female (red), in Khan Yunis between January 1 and May 1 in 2024. The blue area commences at 0 on the vertical axis but is overlaid.[Missing Credit]
Adult males (over 18) represent 25 per cent of the population but are overrepresented by a factor of five. Women and children comprise 34 per cent of all casualties, although they comprise 75 per cent of the population.
The histogram signals that the Israeli army must have been taking major precautions attempting to avoid harm to women and children over a four-month period of intense urban fighting. In contrast, in recent urban armed conflicts in other parts of the world, civilians comprise two to nine times more casualties than combatants, instead of a fraction of males as seen here.
To further obscure the casualty data, the Hamas Ministry of Health did not distinguish, identify and separately publish thousands of deaths from natural causes or disease, or those killed by Hamas itself. It included as fatalities thousands of people who were reported online, created placeholder identities, and belatedly admitted that many were not properly verified or were not even dead. Moreover, the Ministry did not report some known Hamas fallen operatives, and it removed others from its casualty lists, which further inflated the the rate of civilian casualties –and it presented all deaths as civilian.
When questioned by a few in the press about internal inconsistencies in its data, the ministry gave misleading explanations that proved to be false. Our report shows how epidemiological models predicting astronomical death tolls based on ministry data were wildly exaggerated, yet they persisted like ghosts in the genocide discourse.
Rarely studied injury data from hospitals allowed us to discern whether anecdotal reports about civilian casualties given by visiting foreign doctors were validated by corroborative raw hospital data, but in fact they were contradicted. As an example, the leader of the group claimed: “Overwhelmingly, our victims were children. I would say 70-75 per cent of the people we operated on were elementary school age or younger.” Yet the Hamas Ministry of Health statistics for the same hospital during that period show a different picture: children were the group with the least number of injuries, 16-20 per cent of the total, while adult men nearly 60 per cent.
We also found that over much of 2024 the ministry did not publish data on changes in the dynamics of the war over time, as is usually done. It published jumbled cumulative casualties, leading to complete misrepresentations of changes of the war’s intensity over time, especially for disaggregated men, women and child casualties. The ministry’s key publications also made it difficult to make sense and keep track of Gazan unidentified casualties or to see that the overall monthly rate of identified Gazan casualties in mid-2024 was down to about 15 percent of what it was at the start of the war.
The tragic reality is that Hamas’s military defeat was always inevitable. Its leadership knew this. In response, it turned its own people into a macabre sacrifice, orchestrating a gruesome tableau designed to indict and delegitimise Israel. Its hybrid warfare strategy drove multiple points of international pressure through a narrative of genocide that struck against the entirety of the Israeli society. The strategy had the unique advantage of targeting the Jewish state, which ensured that most global media eagerly propagated it.
This narrative – the centrepiece of Hamas’s wartime disinformation – has been its greatest strategic victory in the awful months since 7 October 2023.
Lewi Stone is a Professor of Mathematical Epidemiology at the mathematics department, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia and Emeritus Professor at Tel Aviv University. He has decades of experience working as a biomathematician with research interests in statistics and mathematical modelling and his work encompasses digital humanities and the quantification of warfare.
Gregory Rose is an Honorary Professor of Law at the Australian National Centre for Ocean Resources and Security (ANCORS) at the University of Wollongong, Australia, and Senior Fellow at The Hague Initiative for International Cooperation, Netherlands. His expertise is in international law and his areas of research include international law relating to armed conflict, counterterrorism, transnational environmental crime and marine environmental governance.
