‘Patently Falsified’: Hamas Deletes Thousands From Gaza Death List, Including Over 1,000 Children

Debbie Weiss

Palestinian fighters from the armed wing of Hamas take part in a military parade to mark the anniversary of the 2014 war with Israel, near the border in the central Gaza Strip, July 19, 2023. REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa

Hamas has quietly removed thousands of names from its official casualty reports in Gaza, prompting fresh scrutiny of the accuracy of the death toll figures that have been widely cited by media and international organizations since the start of the Palestinian terrorist group’s war with Israel.

An analysis, conducted by Salo Aizenberg of the US-based nonprofit Honest Reporting and first reported on by the Telegraph, revealed that 3,400 individuals listed as killed in earlier updates released by the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health in August and October 2024 no longer appear in the March 2025 report. Among those missing from the latest list are 1,080 children.

“Hamas has manipulated the number of fatalities they report since the start of the war, overcounting civilian deaths and concealing combatant losses,” Aizenberg told The Algemeiner.

“I took all the unique deaths and ID numbers from the August and October lists. I combined them. I removed duplicates and then compared it to the March list. And there were 3,400 names that didn’t appear,” he said. “In my mind, the 1,080 children are particularly notable.”

Aizenberg said the systematic inflation of civilian death tolls by Hamas is not a new phenomenon. “They have done this in every round of conflict. For example, in 2009’s Cast Lead, Hamas initially claimed that 1,300 Palestinians died and only about 50 were combatants. Months later Hamas admitted that in fact 600-700 were their fighters,” he said.

The casualty lists compiled by the Gaza Ministry of Health are distributed as downloadable PDFs and include personal details such as names, identification numbers, and dates of death. These lists have been widely cited by international media and relied upon by humanitarian groups and United Nations agencies monitoring the toll of the war. The health ministry is under the control of Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip.

The discrepancy in figures has raised questions about the continued reliance on these data sets, especially given mounting evidence of inconsistencies. 

“The evidence is now all out there in the public domain,” Andrew Fox, a former British paratrooper who has worked with Aizenberg on data-verification projects in the past, told The Algemeiner. “These Hamas numbers are error-strewn and clearly manipulated.”

Aizenberg built databases by converting the PDF lists into spreadsheets, allowing for comparative analysis across different time points. That process revealed the March 2025 report included significantly fewer names than earlier versions. The findings cast doubt on previously unchallenged casualty estimates.

Hamas has claimed that more than 50,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the war began in October 2023. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it has killed 20,000 Hamas combatants during that time and maintains that it takes extensive precautions to avoid civilian casualties. “The IDF has never, and will never, deliberately target children,” the IDF said in a statement.

According to a December report authored by Fox and published by the Henry Jackson Society, nearly half of those killed in Gaza are combatants, directly contradicting claims that the vast majority of casualties are civilians. The report also pointed to demographic inconsistencies, including the repeated listing of women and children to support allegations of indiscriminate attacks, and the lowering of adult men’s ages to inflate the number of minors reported killed.

“You can’t say it’s a genocide when half the people that have died are combatants who are still fighting,” Fox told The Algemeiner at the time. 

The debate over casualty figures was intensified by a February 2025 article published in the medical journal The Lancet, which estimated that Gaza’s true death toll could be as high as 64,000. That estimate was based on a statistical extrapolation using “capture-recapture” methods applied to a subset of the ministry’s data. The researchers behind the study said they only used what they called “hospital-recorded deaths” from June 2024 and asserted that these records were the most verified.

But Aizenberg said that claim does not hold up to scrutiny. He reviewed the same June dataset used by the Lancet study and found that 881 names in that core group were later removed in the March update. In his view, this undermines the foundation of the statistical model used to estimate excess mortality. 

“They do this very careful statistical analysis, taking three lists and doing capture, recapture from vetted lists of hospital recorded deaths,” Aizenberg said. “And then I took their June list that they used again [in the February report] and I found 881 were also removed from the March list. So even after a really careful study [its] core data sources are not valid.”

Past reports have noted that the casualty forms used to populate the lists could be submitted online by anyone with access to a Google Form, raising concerns about verification protocols. 

Despite these issues, some international entities, including the United Nations, and news outlets have continued to cite the figures from the Gaza Ministry of Health, occasionally with the disclaimer that the numbers could not be independently confirmed.

Fox said such caveats are insufficient and that the deletions from Hamas’s own published records have, in his view, stripped away any plausible justification for continuing to rely on the ministry’s figures. “It is malpractice and deeply irresponsible on the part of any media organization still using them. There is simply no excuse for repeating them as credible,” he said.

Aharon Barak’s protest gavel

Ruthie Blum

Former Supreme Court President Aharon Barak. Photo by Yonatan Sindel/Flash90.

In a slew of interviews on Thursday, former Supreme Court President Aharon Barak came out swinging his proverbial gavel. His target was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—this time around for firing Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar and gearing up to get rid of Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara.

Since going after Netanyahu was what the left-wing press expected of the esteemed elder, the retired judge-turned-oracle didn’t disappoint. If anything, he went above and beyond the call of duty.

“The prime minister,” he told Channel 13, “needs to understand that the situation is very bad and that … we are heading toward bloodshed, toward a civil war.”

The schism among Israelis, he said to Ynet, “is getting worse and, in the end, I fear, it will be like a train that goes off the tracks and plunges in a chasm, causing a civil war.”

And this to Channel 12: “[T]he rift in the public is immense, and no effort is being made to heal it. … Today, there are demonstrations … but tomorrow there will be shootings, and the day after that there will be bloodshed.”

This is just a taste of Barak’s multi-media onslaught. Though described by his champions as a “warning” to the Netanyahu-led government that any moves against Bar and Baharav-Miara would rip apart the country and—ho hum—destroy Israeli democracy, his pontificating had two main motives.

The first was to threaten Netanyahu that if he proceeds with the ousters—the legality of which is indisputable—the demonstrations in the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv will turn violent. Implicit in the admonition was that such a dangerous spike in societal unrest would be both inevitable and justified.

The second aim of Barak’s sermonizing was to signal support for Bar’s refusal to exit his post and Baharav-Miara’s abuse of her role, while instructing the High Court to overrule the government in each of the cases. As though it needed any coaxing on that score.

Still, a nod from the father of Israel’s “constitutional revolution”—who justified his power grab for the bench more than 30 years ago on the grounds that “no areas in life are outside the law”—is a cherished commodity among the robed elites. Though he retired 18 years ago at the mandatory age of 70, he remains a jurisprudence giant in the eyes of the legal community, at home and abroad.

Indeed, even those who consider his activism excessive tend to pay lip service to his ostensibly original thinking and supposed superior intellect. Due to this reputation, however ill-deserved, Netanyahu selected him to sit as Israel’s ad hoc judge at the International Court of Justice in January 2024—to hear proceedings brought by South Africa accusing the Jewish state of violating the Genocide Convention.

The choice of Barak raised eyebrows and hackles on the right. After all, he had been a key figure in helping the opposition undermine the government’s plans to reform the judicial system.

During the months leading up to Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion and ensuing war in Gaza, Barak—who referred to the right-wing victory in the November 2022 election as a “tyranny of the majority—gave credence to the lie that any judicial reform would result in an end to Israeli democracy. Then, as now, the press made a pilgrimage to his home to amplify the bogus allegation.

Netanyahu must have thought that dispatching the internationally renowned, anti-Bibi Barak to The Hague was thus a wise maneuver. But it was actually too clever by half, which is why it backfired.

Rather than fully representing Israel’s position, Barak voted in favor of two out of six measures proposed by South Africa:​ the “facilitation of humanitarian aid” to Gaza and the “prevention of inflammatory speech that could incite further violence.”

Judge Julia Sebutinde of Uganda put him to shame by dissenting on all six anti-Israel measures. Not that he felt remorse for his disgraceful performance, mind you. On the contrary, he clearly took pride in showing the antisemitic kangaroo tribunal that he wasn’t tainted by loyalty to his people.

Fortunately, he resigned in June from the futile position, citing “personal family reasons” and thanking Netanyahu “for the trust you placed in me.”

No mention of his betrayal of that trust, other than from those of us who weren’t the least bit surprised by it. You know, considering his outrageous conduct prior to and during the proceedings.

Nor were we shocked at his being dusted off and shoved in front of the cameras last week to reiterate his indictment of the democratically elected political echelon and foment the worst form of internecine strife—at a time when the country is in the throes of an existential battle for its survival, no less.

Dubbing him the “high priest of progressivism,” Likud MK and Deputy Knesset Speaker Hanoch Milwidsky aptly summed up the message of Barak’s recent broadcast-blitz: “Submit to us, or there will be bloodshed. Do as we wish, or there will be a civil war.”

Barak, he tweeted, is a “dangerous and dark man. I hope he lives long enough to see his ‘constitutional revolution’ abandoned in favor of true democracy in the Jewish state of Israel.”

Amen to that.

Ruthie Blum, a former adviser at the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is an award-winning columnist and a senior contributing editor at JNS. Co-host with Ambassador Mark Regev of the JNS-TV podcast “Israel Undiplomatic,” she writes on Israeli politics and U.S.-Israel relations. Originally from New York, she moved to Israel in 1977. She is a regular guest on national and international media outlets, including Fox, Sky News, i24News, Scripps, ILTV, WION and Newsmax.

Poll: Nearly 60% of Israelis support return to fighting Hamas in Gaza

JNS Staff

Israel Defense Forces soldiers operate in the Gaza Strip, June 21, 2024. Credit: IDF.

Nearly three in five Israelis back the resumption of fighting in the Gaza Strip in the wake of Hamas’s rejection of a U.S. proposal to extend the ceasefire in exchange for the release of more hostages.

According to a survey carried out by Israel’s Direct Polls Institute and published by Channel 14 on Monday night—before the Israel Defense Forces launched a campaign of extensive airstrikes in Gaza—59% of Israelis support the resumption of hostilities.

Some 38% said they opposed it, while 3% of respondents did not express a position.

Direct Polls, which accurately predicted the results of the Jewish state’s most recent general election in 2022, surveyed a representative sample of 506 Israeli adults on March 17. (The margin of error is plus or minus 4.5 percentage points at a confidence level of 95%, Direct Polls said.)

The IDF announced early on Tuesday morning that it had launched “extensive” strikes against Hamas targets in Gaza. The Israeli Prime Minister’s Office said the military was acting after Hamas rebuffed several proposals from U.S. Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff and others.

“Israel will, from now on, act against Hamas with increasing military strength,” said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office.

The goal of the campaign remains to achieve “the objectives of the war as they have been determined by the political echelon, including the release of all of our hostages, the living and the deceased,” the PMO statement added.

Even before Netanyahu ordered the airstrikes, his Likud Party was strengthening in the polls, according to Monday’s Direct Polls survey.

If a vote were to be called now, the Likud Party would secure 34 Knesset mandates out of the parliament’s 120, up two since the previous Direct Polls survey published on March 6 and one more than it won in the general election on Nov. 1, 2022.

Netanyahu’s coalition of right-wing and religious parties would win 64 mandates, up one since the March 6 survey, and the same amount of Knesset mandates it received in the 2022 election, per Direct Polls.

After the Likud Party, Yair Golan’s far-left HaDemokratim received the next most seats (18), followed by the Yisrael Beytenu Party (14), Shas (11), United Torah Judaism and National Unity Party (eight each), Yesh Atid and Otzma Yehudit (six each), and Religious Zionism, Ra’am (the United Arab List) and Hadash-Ta’al (five each).

In a head-to-head matchup for who is best suited for the role of prime minister, Netanyahu defeated National Unity Party’s Benny Gantz by a margin of 47% to 17% (36% of respondents said neither was suited).

When choosing between Netanyahu and Yesh Atid’s Yair Lapid, 47% replied that the longtime Likud prime minister was best suited to lead the Jewish state, 20% preferred Lapid, and 33% said neither.

The next national vote is scheduled for 2026.

Education minister threatens to defund Tel Aviv school that urged students to skip class in protest

JNS Staff

“Ze’ev Degani is a criminal,” Kisch said of the Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium’s principal.

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Ze’ev Degani, principal of the Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium in Tel Aviv, Sept. 4, 2023. Photo by Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90.

Israeli Education Minister Yoav Kisch vowed Monday to “immediately” suspend the funding of the Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium if the Tel Aviv high school would follow through on threats to cancel class to allow pupils to protest the pending firing of Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar.

“Ze’ev Degani is a criminal,” Kisch said of the school’s headmaster. He noted that Degani’s decision “to shut down class and dispatch students to a political protest is a serious and direct violation of the Compulsory Education Law,” which mandates school attendance until the age of 17.

“The education system is not a free-for-all, and we will not allow schools to become battlegrounds for political conflicts,” continued the minister.

“For this reason, Degani and the Herzliya Gymnasium’s executive board were summoned for an urgent hearing on Wednesday. If the school is indeed shut down, the funding that the Herzliya Gymnasium receives from the education system will be immediately halted,” he added.

“Schools are places for learning, not platforms for political propaganda. Politics will remain with the politicians,” concluded Kisch’s statement.

In a missive sent to his staff earlier on Monday, Degani reportedly wrote that the Jewish state’s democracy was “on the verge of collapse” due to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s announcement he would seek the dismissal of Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) chief Ronen Bar.

“We can no longer remain silent. The prime minister is turning the country into a dictatorship by acting against the law,” said Degani. “On Wednesday, it will be impossible to teach history and math at school.”

Netanyahu summoned Bar for an urgent meeting on Sunday evening, where he informed him that the government would consider his firing later this week due to a lack of confidence and “ongoing distrust.” The Cabinet vote is reportedly scheduled to take place on Wednesday.

In August 2023, Kisch vowed to “deal with” Degani after the Herzliya Gymnasium was found to encourage its students to evade mandatory military service in the Israel Defense Forces.

The far-left Youth Against Dictatorship group, which had been rallying teens to refuse army service, that month took over the school in protest against Netanyahu’s now-largely-shelved judicial reform plans. Degani was said to have officially approved the event before it took place.

Among other speakers, students heard from Saleh Diab, a violent terror supporter from eastern Jerusalem’s Shimon HaTzadik neighborhood.

Diab has been arrested numerous times for attacking Jews, including on suspicion of attacking Shabbat worshippers with an iron rod. In 2014, he served months in prison for aggravated assault on a Jewish neighbor.