Hamas Quietly Reduces Civilian Death Toll — 72% Are Combat-Aged Men

Hamas quietly removed the names of thousands of Palestinians it had previously alleged were killed during the Israel-Hamas war, Salo Aizenberg, from the US-based non-profit organisation Honest Reporting told The Telegraph on Tuesday after analyzing Hamas’s March 2025 casualty update.

Hamas has previously claimed that 70% of casualties have been women and children, a claim no longer reflected in their recently updated lists, according to the research. Approximately 72% of fatalities between the ages of 13-55 are men - the demographic category aligns with Hamas combatants.

“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 asserted.

Taking Hamas figures as fact

A similar report by the Henry Jackson Society in December also concluded that Hamas had inflated the number of casualties in the war.

“We knew there were rafts of errors in their reporting,” report author Andrew 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.

“The UN also just takes Hamas’s figures and publishes them with a note stating the figures are unconfirmed.”

Hamas will “have gone through the list, trying to make it as convincing as possible. They’ve been accepting names onto that list with no evidence whatsoever,” Fox explained.

“So what I’m guessing they’re trying to do is thin out the names they cannot substantiate at all.”

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

“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.”