Hamas Quietly Removes Thousands of Names from War Casualty Lists, Research Reveals Massive Data Manipulation

By: Fern Sidman

A new wave of scrutiny has emerged over Hamas’s wartime casualty reporting following a meticulous data analysis that reveals the organization has quietly removed thousands of names it had previously listed as dead during the ongoing conflict with Israel. According to a report that appeared on Wednesday in The Jerusalem Post, Salo Aizenberg of the U.S.-based media watchdog Honest Reporting exposed the manipulation after comparing Hamas’s most recent March 2025 fatality list to earlier versions published in August and October 2024.

Aizenberg’s findings, shared with The Telegraph of the UK and reported in The Jerusalem Post, point to a staggering discrepancy: over 3,400 fully “identified” deaths have now vanished from Hamas’s official records — including the names of 1,080 children who were previously claimed to have died. These individuals, Aizenberg insists, “never existed in the first place.”

“This is not a rounding error,” Aizenberg emphasized. “The numbers were falsified — again.”

For months, Hamas has claimed that 70% of all fatalities in Gaza were women and children, portraying Israel’s military campaign as indiscriminate and disproportionate. But The Jerusalem Post reported that this widely quoted statistic no longer holds up under scrutiny of Hamas’s own revised data.

Aizenberg’s updated analysis indicates that approximately 72% of fatalities between the ages of 13 and 55 are now recorded as men — a demographic that aligns closely with military-age combatants, and not with non-combatant civilian populations.

These revisions cast serious doubt on the credibility of casualty reports cited by international media, governments, and human rights organizations — many of whom have based their assessments on figures supplied by Hamas’s Health Ministry, according to the information provided in The Jerusalem Post report.

A December 2024 report from the Henry Jackson Society, a UK-based think tank, had already flagged Hamas for inflating death tolls. As reported by The Jerusalem Post, that investigation also concluded that the group’s lists were “riddled with errors,” including duplicate names, individuals miscategorized as children, and reports of deceased persons who were later found to be alive.

“We knew there were rafts of errors in their reporting,” said Andrew Fox, the report’s lead author. “There’s a reasonable explanation in that their computer systems went down in November 2023, so it’s been challenging for them to report accurately — but the lists are so unreliable that the world’s media shouldn’t be quoting them as reliable.”

Fox noted that despite these inconsistencies, the United Nations continues to publish Hamas’s figures, with the only caveat being that the numbers are “unconfirmed.”

Hamas publishes its death toll data in PDF format, which makes line-by-line comparisons between releases technically difficult. But Aizenberg and Fox both employed advanced techniques — converting the data into Excel spreadsheets — to conduct mass cross-referencing of names across reports spanning months, as was indicated in The Jerusalem Post report.

Fox explained the likely motivation behind Hamas’s recent data purge: “They’ve been accepting names onto that list with no evidence whatsoever. So what I’m guessing they’re trying to do now is thin out the names they cannot substantiate at all.”

In short, the March 2025 list appears to be an attempt to retroactively sanitize the record — eliminating names that could no longer be justified or proven under external pressure or increased scrutiny.

“Salo’s research would be looking for names that were on previous lists but have now disappeared,” Fox added in remarks published by The Jerusalem Post.

The revelations carry weighty implications for how war reporting and international diplomacy are conducted. Much of the global condemnation of Israel has rested heavily on Hamas-provided data. As The Jerusalem Post report highlighted, these casualty numbers have influenced everything from UN resolutions to ceasefire demands and the framing of war crimes allegations.

Aizenberg’s research now calls for a fundamental reassessment of these narratives. If the foundational statistics are suspect, the conclusions drawn from them — including those echoed in media headlines, NGO reports, and foreign policy briefings — are potentially built on sand.

As pressure mounts, watchdog organizations such as Honest Reporting are demanding that media outlets and international bodies cease treating Hamas’s data as reliable without independent verification.

“This isn’t just about getting numbers wrong,” said Aizenberg, according to the report in The Jerusalem Post. “It’s about manipulating world opinion by falsifying the very foundation of the humanitarian narrative.”

With these findings now in the public sphere, attention turns to global institutions — including the UN and major international news agencies — to re-examine their practices and standards when quoting casualty figures in conflict zones controlled by armed, unaccountable factions like Hamas.