A new report uncovers significant 'statistical anomalies' in Hamas's account of the death toll in the war in Gaza

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Last Monday, NBC News ran a story on an Israeli airstrike in Khan Younis, under the headline: Women and Children Killed in Israeli Airstrikes on Gaza Shelters. It reported that the attack “helped push the death toll in Gaza beyond 45,000, most of them women and children, according to Palestinian health officials.”

The idea that most of the dead in the Israel-Hamas war are women and children is often heard in western media, which has been uncritically regurgitating Hamas talking points since the start of the war, furthering the narrative that Israel is using disproportionate force and perhaps even committing a “genocide.” Could this possibly be true?

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Not according to a new report written by Andrew Fox, a former British army officer and senior lecturer at Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, for the Henry Jackson Society, a U.K.-based think-tank, which adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting that Hamas is intentionally inflating casualty counts, particularly among women and children, as part of its propaganda war against the Jewish state.

The report — titled, “Questionable Counting: Analysing the Death Toll From the Hamas-Run Ministry of Health in Gaza” — includes a meticulous analysis of casualty figures released by Hamas since the October 7 massacre that sparked the ongoing war in Gaza, along with a third-party media analysis on how the numbers have been reported.

It found “widespread inaccuracies and distortion in the data collection process” used by the Gaza Ministry of Health (MoH), including “significant daily increases in the reported deaths of women and children that are mathematically impossible.”

© National Post