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Source: https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/02/04/the-shameful-disinformation-over-the-gaza-death-toll/
The Shameful Disinformation over the Gaza Death Toll
(Spiked-UK) Maj. (ret.) Andrew Fox - On Jan. 29, the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz reported, based on an anonymous source, that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had "accepted" the Gaza Health Ministry's (GHM) estimate of 70,000 Palestinian deaths since October 2023. However, there appears to be a significant gap between media narrative and reality. The IDF has outright denied Ha'aretz's report, saying the 70,000 figure "does not reflect official IDF data." Unsurprisingly, this has been conveniently ignored in much of the news coverage. Everyone agrees the war has been devastating. The real dispute concerns the composition of that death toll. How many of the dead were Hamas combatants or victims of Hamas's own actions, rather than civilians killed by the IDF. By early 2024, the Hamas-run GHM was claiming that 70% of the dead were "women and children." This claim was always nonsense, and is easily disproven just by looking more closely at Hamas's own data. Most of the casualties were, in fact, male, with a disproportionate number of those being of fighting age. Over a year ago, the Henry Jackson Society published my team's analysis on the GHM's fatality lists. We discovered that Hamas's lists were riddled with errors and non-combat deaths. Individuals' ages and genders were frequently misreported (men were listed as women, adults as children) in ways that artificially inflated the count of female and child victims. The lists included people who had died before the war - including those killed by Hamas's own actions (such as by misfired militant rockets). Unsurprisingly, the published toll made no mention of any Hamas combatants whatsoever. We also observed that the Gazan death toll encompassed natural deaths, which would have occurred regardless of the war. While Gazan officials claimed over 440 deaths from malnutrition or starvation during the war, Israel disputes that any deaths from hunger ever occurred. The IDF notes that Hamas likely counted individuals with severe illnesses as "starvation" victims. The upshot remains that the death toll of 70,000 is a composite of many categories of deaths which cannot be attributed entirely to Israel. The mishandling of this issue has done a huge disservice to both truth and history. Gaza's dead deserve to be remembered accurately, not reduced to pawns in a propaganda contest. We should not fail the innocents lost by obscuring the reason their lives were cut short in the first place: a war that was started by the terrorists of Hamas, in which they did everything they could to place civilians in harm's way. The writer, a research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society, served for 16 years in the British Army.