Claims by Hamas that 70 per cent of casualties in the Gaza conflict are women and children have been dismissed as “demonstrably false” in a new report.

The report by the Henry Jackson Society, a think tank, undermines claims that Israel’s armed forces have been responsible for the indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians during the conflict.

Its findings are in contrast to assertions by Gaza’s Hamas-run government that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has deliberately targeted women and children.

The Henry Jackson Society claims that the IDF has generally managed to avoid disproportionately harming civilians, even though many thousands have been killed.

In the report, Prof Lewi Stone and Prof Gregory Rose said that claims made by the Gaza ministry of health of a 70 per cent casualty rate for women and children among the 51,000 Palestinians it says have been killed since Oct 7 2023 are inconsistent with its own underlying hospital casualty figures.

They found that Gaza hospital records and lists of the deceased showed that, since the start of the conflict, women and children have accounted for 51 per cent of deaths overall, and that in the past year the rate of civilian casualties has fallen to below that figure.

Citing the example of the bitter fighting over Khan Younis during the first quarter of last year, the report found that although women and children comprised 75 per cent of the city’s population, they accounted for 34 per cent of deaths.

Numerous warnings were issued by the IDF for civilians to leave Khan Younis before its troops began their search for Hamas combatants.

Profs Stone and Rose also found that of 11,224 people killed since October last year, 76.3 per cent (8,565) were male and 23.7 per cent (2,659) were female. Of these, 58 per cent were men of fighting age.

Their report stated: “The reduced proportion of women and children casualties indicates increased Israeli avoidance of Gazan civilian harm since Oct 7 2023. This data shows the opposite picture to what one would expect from the narrative of Hamas and its allies, who alleged indiscriminate killing.”

They said the Hamas government media office had “painted a lurid picture of indiscriminate killing of women and children by Israel, supposedly supported by the ministry of health but often inconsistent with its datasets.

“The Hamas government media office curated the data to spin media-ready versions that inflated women and children’s deaths to levels that gave the deceptive impression of indiscriminate Israeli attacks on women and children.”

The two academics claimed that the ministry, many of whose directors are Hamas appointees, has manipulated its own hospital data.

They said: “[ministry of health] MoH ‘dashboard’ infographics and public statements were demonstrably false when compared to its own datasets. For example, its repeated publishing of a 70 per cent women and children casualty rate that was inconsistent with its detailed hospital-sourced datasets.”

The report comes after Israel admitted that “professional failures” had led to the killing of 15 emergency workers in Gaza last month. An inquiry into the incident by the IDF found a series of failings, including “operational errors” and a “breach of orders”.

Fourteen emergency workers and a UN worker were killed on March 23 after a convoy of Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) ambulances, a UN car and a fire truck came under fire by the Israeli military.

During Israel’s military response to the Oct 7 attacks, thousands of innocent civilians have been killed and injured, and survivors’ daily existence has been made unbearable.

But Stone and Rose said their work “identifies extensive statistical anomalies, glaring inconsistencies, and a concerted effort by Hamas to inflate the number of civilian deaths – particularly among women and children – while systematically omitting combatant fatalities, especially amongst its own operatives.

“These manipulations have been cynically designed to distort the civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio and weaponise public opinion against Israel.”

The IDF claimed to have killed about 20,000 fighters from Hamas and other groups at the start of this year.

The report stated, however, that no Gazan casualties were identified as combatants by the ministry of health. It added that adult male deaths, which it said were strongly indicative of combatant status, had been routinely excluded or under-reported by the Hamas-run government “to suit propaganda ends”.

Prof Rose, an honorary professor of law at the University of Wollongong, in Australia, said: “Hamas has waged not just a physical war but an information war, and far too many in the West have fallen for it.

“It is imperative that our media, policymakers, and institutions treat data emanating from terrorist organisations with the scepticism and scrutiny it so obviously requires.”

Prof Stone, a professor of mathematical epidemiology at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, added: “Manipulated statistics have real-world consequences. When international bodies, human rights organisations, and even Western governments make policy on the basis of falsified data, they are, wittingly or not, advancing the aims of a terrorist organisation.”

The Gaza ministry of health has denied either falsifying casualty figures or later removing names from lists of those killed.

Zaher al-Wahidi, an official with the ministry, said this week: “The health ministry works towards having accurate data with high credibility. In every list that gets shared, there is a greater verification and revision of the list. We cannot say that the health ministry removes names. It’s not a removal process, rather, it is a revision and verification process.”

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