Civilian Death Toll in Gaza Debunked

January 21, 2025

by: Ilse Strauss ~ Bridges for Peace

Tuesday, 21 January 2025 | In the 15 months since terror organization Hamas launched a war on Israel, the steep civilian death toll has thrust this conflict into the international limelight. An outraged public took to city streets decrying the slaughter of innocents, South Africa charged Israel with genocide and even the pope spoke out against the carnage.

But what if the facts and figures that underpin these accusations are incorrect? In fact, what if the statistics have been manipulated to present a warped picture that maligns Israel and casts Hamas as the defender of an oppressed population?

According to military and psychology expert, Maj. (res.) Andrew Fox, that is precisely the case.

Fox has the boots-on-the-ground experience and academic knowledge to back up his claim. A research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society—a UK-based think tank that promotes democracy, freedom and human rights—Fox served in the British Army for 16 years, completing three tours in Afghanistan, including one attached to US Army Special Forces. He served as a senior lecturer at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, and holds degrees in Law and Politics, War Studies and Military History and Psychology.

Last month, Fox and a team of experts made international waves by publishing a report entitled, “Questionable Counting: Analysing the Death Toll from the Hamas-Run Ministry of Health in Gaza.”

Civilian fatalities play a key role in how the international community perceives a conflict, Fox shares. It shapes public opinion and policy. That makes reliability paramount. The report thus drills down into the civilian death toll Hamas provided to test its dependability, and if found to be capricious, to pinpoint some of the obvious flaws.

The crux of the report? The 45,000 civilian fatalities presented by the Hamas-run Ministry of Health contains thousands of natural deaths, fatalities from before this conflict began and casualties caused by Hamas itself. Likewise, it contains no mention of combatant losses, which automatically classifies all deaths in the conflict as civilian, and misrepresents, overstates and inflates the number of women and children killed. Moreover, leading international media outlets accept these figures without scrutiny and report them as fact.

In short, Hamas manipulates the figures for propaganda purposes, presents them to the media, which largely parrots the statistics to the public as reality, who accepts the concocted figures as truth and then uses the fictitious data as evidence to blame and pressure Israel.

According to Fox, the idea for the report was born during the first months of the war when he noticed irregularities. “I looked at the casualty numbers reported in the media being pushed out by the Hamas Ministry of Health in Gaza, and it clearly didn’t make sense. I’ve called for airstrikes in the past. I’ve seen what airstrikes do to buildings, and there’s no way you can have an immediate running ticker counter of deaths when the situation is that violent, chaotic and dangerous. Frankly, for people to get in there and start counting just didn’t add up.”

Fox shared his concerns with fellow researchers, and late last year, a panel of international scholars pooled resources for a meticulous analysis of Gaza war fatalities from February 2024 through May 2024, alongside coverage from major media outlets, specifically the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, CNN, the BBC, Reuters and AP.

Five key findings emerged: men are listed as women to increase female fatalities; adult fatalities are classified as children to inflate child fatalities; the majority of casualties are fighting-age males; the statistics make no allowance for natural deaths and thus group all deaths as a collective; and the media reporting plays into the ploy, taking the skewed statistics as truth with no questions asked.

The 40-page report offers numerous examples as evidence, for instance, repeated instances of individuals with male first names, like Mohammed, recorded as females. Mistakes happen, Fox concedes, especially during the chaos of war and certainly when it comes to names or gender. However, this is not a case of a careless slipup or two. There’s enough evidence to prove the demographics breakdown flawed. Moreover, the gender discrepancies are the tip of the iceberg.

“Quite often, when they don’t have an age for a fighter, we found it goes down as 0, and when that age is 0, of course that’s counted as a child,” Fox explains. “We also found entries like a 31-year-old being listed as a four-year-old child, a difficult mistake to make by accident.”

According to Fox, misrepresentations like these purposefully manipulate the data to inflate the tally of innocents and skew the statistics for a more emotive impact, thus fueling the narrative that the civilian population of women and children are bearing the brunt of the war.

In contrast to the message communicated in mainstream media, the most fatalities in Gaza are men aged 15–45, Fox says. This age bracket corresponds with the expected profile of combatants in war, and is witnessed in Gaza in the massive upsurge in adult male deaths reported by families as opposed to the fatality statistics from hospitals.

“Gaza’s population comprises 26% fighting-aged males,” he explains. “So even if Israel was targeting the population indiscriminately, you would expect roughly 26% of the fatalities to fall in that category. Actually, it’s closer to 44%, over 50% in some places. We also have proof that Hamas uses child soldiers, so even some of the under 18s will probably have been Hamas combatants.”

The pieces of the puzzle point to the simple conclusion that Israel targets fighting age males, not random civilians, Fox holds. “It is often portrayed as if the IDF drops bombs randomly to kill people. They’re not following a targeting process. We see criticism of Israel for strikes in a humanitarian zone. And the reason they’re striking there is because Hamas is hiding amongst civilians, which is clearly a war crime. You hear all the time about how women and children are dying disproportionately. That’s not the case.”

Gaza’s fatality statistics further overlooks natural deaths and pointedly ignores the typical annual rate of 5,000 natural deaths in Gaza. Apart from the names of cancer patients who are registered for treatment appearing on the list of those supposedly killed by Israel, the statistics also make no allowance for deaths caused by well-documented internal violence or misfired rockets.

It is particularly troubling that media reporting plays into the ploy, taking the distorted statistics as truth with no questions asked, Fox warns. In fact, a scant 3% of media coverage analyzed even mentions combatant deaths. The result? “A skewed narrative that portrays all casualties as civilian, thus shaping public opinion and international policy based on incomplete or manipulated data,” the report warns.

Asked about the motivation behind penning a report that challenges the popular narrative, Fox dispels the notion of a pro-Israel impetus. “If I looked at the facts, figures and everything I know contextually and academically about warfare and came to the conclusion that Israel was committing a genocide, then I would say so. As an analyst, that’s my job. But the fact is they’re not.”

Ultimately, Fox warns, it is not about Israel. “There is a wider battle being fought here in the West. And it’s about our values, truth and giving people a fair trial. It’s about extremism and perversion of Western societies. Everything about the way in which this war is being reported on is part of that much bigger fight.

“It’s easy to say, ‘Hey, it’s Israel’s problem. Let them fight their own war,’” he concludes. “But it’s much bigger than just Israel. It’s important that people fight this subversion of our international narratives. I spent the best part of my adult life fighting Islamic extremism in Afghanistan. The last thing we need is to allow Islamic extremism to find a foothold in the West and start impacting on the way we do business on a global scale.”

(For an exclusive interview with Andrew Fox click here.)

Posted on January 21, 2025

Source: (Bridges for Peace, January 21, 2025)

Photo License: Andrew Fox

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Andrew Fox