Hamas quietly erases 3,400 ‘casualties’ from its own war fatality lists, research shows

Hamas has quietly removed thousands of names from the casualty lists it has been releasing since the beginning of the war, according to a researcher who has closely tracked the changes throughout the conflict.

Research by Salo Aizenberg, a board member at the U.S.-based organization HonestReporting, revealed that more than 3,400 previously reported deaths have been erased from Hamas’ official lists.

Aizenberg has been highlighting discrepancies in the reported figures since October 2023.

Hamas has consistently claimed that 70% of casualties in the Gaza war have been women and children. However, Aizenberg’s analysis of the group’s updated casualty list from March 2025 suggests otherwise.

“Hamas’s new March 2025 fatality list quietly drops 3,400 fully ‘identified’ deaths listed in its August and October 2024 reports – including 1,080 children. These ‘deaths’  never happened. The numbers were falsified – again,” Aizenberg told the British newspaper, The Telegraph. 

Andrew Fox, a former British paratrooper and author of a related report published by the Henry Jackson Society in December, stated that Hamas included “rafts of errors” in its reported casualty figures.

“We knew there were rafts of errors in their reporting,” Fox said. “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 has previously collaborated with Salo Aizenberg on assessments of Hamas’ casualty lists.

Aizenberg first commented on the initial findings of his latest study at the end of March, noting that Hamas had included approximately 8,000 natural deaths in its figures to inflate the overall casualty count.

🧵GAZA FATALITY UPDATE: Hamas issued new list of 50,021 fatalities. Findings: (a) Fatalities age 13-55 are 72% men (b) Teen soldiers confirmed; males=65% of deaths age 13-17 (c) Natural deaths are ~8,300 of total fatalities. (4) IDF targeted combatants; NO genocide. Analysis: 1/ pic.twitter.com/gP2nl4ztLc

— Aizenberg (@Aizenberg55) March 27, 2025

Aizenberg also noted that while the deaths among boys and girls were roughly equal under the age of 10, by age 13, male deaths accounted for 65% of the reported deaths. That proportion climbed as high as 72% when expanding the age range from 13 to 55.

This data suggests that combat-age males have constituted the majority of war-related deaths, while women and children accounted for only about 43% of the total.

“Salo’s research would be looking for names that were on previous lists but have now disappeared,” Fox explained. 

He noted that comparisons between the lists have been challenging because Hamas releases the lists in a PDF format.

“Hamas releases lists as PDFs, so it’s harder to do comparisons, but we transfer names to an Excel sheet to do a mass comparison this way,” Fox explained. 

The casualty lists released by Hamas have been repeatedly cited as credible by international media and the United Nations. However, critics have raised concerns about the accuracy and transparency of these figures, pointing to inconsistencies and the potential inflation of numbers for political purposes.

“Hamas has falsified fatality data in past wars, as this thread shows – despite the claims of its defenders, who wrongly insist Hamas has always been accurate, and even falsely claim that Israel accepts Hamas data as reliable,” Aizenberg wrote in a post to 𝕏, which included screenshots of the PDFs and a breakdown of the discrepancies. 

🧵BOMBSHELL: Hamas’ new March 2025 fatality list quietly drops 3,400 fully “identified” deaths listed in its Aug & Oct 2024 reports—including 1,080 children. These "deaths" never happened. The numbers were falsified—again. Examples, analysis and evidence: 1/ pic.twitter.com/30VHnisSQ6

— Aizenberg (@Aizenberg55) March 31, 2025

Fox said the data proves that the IDF is correct, and that Israel has been targeting “fighting age men.” 

“We know Hamas uses child soldiers,” Fox said. “But overwhelmingly, the data shows that Israel is targeting fighting-aged men – not women and children.” 

The report Fox authored in December revealed that the Hamas-led Ministry of Health in Gaza has “systematically inflated the death toll by failing to distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths, over-reporting fatalities among women and children, and even including individuals who died before the conflict began.” 

“This has led to a narrative where the Israel Defense Forces are portrayed as disproportionately targeting civilians, while the actual numbers suggest a significant proportion of the dead are combatants,” the report concluded. 

Aizenberg's latest analysis backs up that claim. 

“The IDF makes great efforts to estimate and consider potential civilian collateral damage in its strikes. The IDF has never, and will never, deliberately target children,” the Israeli military said in a statement.