Summary
The Hamas-controlled Gaza health ministry (GMOH) whose casualty and starvation figures are the principal quantitative source answered in Debunking the Genocide Allegations (Debunking the Genocide Allegations: A Reexamination of the Israel-Hamas War from October 7, 2023 to June 1, 2025, PDF p.13, p.20).
Details
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The Executive Summary argues GMOH reports are unreliable, that since 2014 Gaza authorities mandated classifying all fallen combatants as innocent citizens, and that the 70 percent women-and-children claim was false from the start on GMOH’s own data (PDF p.13).
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Updated records are given as women of all ages and minors under 18 constituting 50.7 percent of casualties, men 73 percent of victims aged 18-59 and 67 percent of those aged 15-17 (PDF p.20).
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GMOH starvation deaths are given as 41, a further 57 in May 2025, and only 440 for the entire war even after the later food crisis (PDF p.38-39); its Rafah-period death totals are used at PDF p.47.
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Chapter 5 (PDF p.119-127) is devoted to GMOH casualty counting: its reliance is the Certainty mirage; GMOH does not distinguish civilians from combatants, in accordance with Hamas’s 2014 Interior Ministry directive to call every dead person an “innocent citizen” (Figures 15-16, PDF p.120-121); and its model of manipulation is the inclusion of around 6,400 natural and rocket-misfire deaths (13 percent of the total) and the exclusion of a similar number of combat-aged male deaths, which would make the distribution compatible with IDF claims of 20,000 combatants eliminated before the January 17, 2025 ceasefire (PDF p.119).
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The Al-Ahli claim of 471 killed in an Israeli attack on October 17, 2023 is treated as a knowing lie — a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket exploding in the hospital parking lot — with that day’s data manipulated to include almost no casualties from other strikes, and never corrected (PDF p.122).
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Abraham Wyner’s figures, reproduced as Figures 17-18, show no statistically significant correlation between women and children killed, and a strong negative correlation between men and women, in GMOH daily reports from October 27 to November 24, 2023; GMOH specifically chose not to identify adult male gender, “maleness” being implied by non-identification as women or children (PDF p.122-125).
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GMOH persistently reported over 70 percent women and children until April 2024 (74 percent in December 2023), a figure almost precisely matching their share of the general population and largely unchanged despite drastic shifts in combat dynamics (PDF p.125).
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The dated lists GMOH supplied privately to Zeina Jamaluddine give women and children as 61 percent of identified casualties in October 2023 and 57 percent in November, against the 70 percent reported at the time (PDF p.123, p.127).
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From November 2023 GMOH reports were supplemented with “reliable media reports” from the Gaza Media Office, 62 percent of all reports by March 18, 2024, which the work says served to artificially inflate the women-and-children proportion (PDF p.127).
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Among UNRWA staff, men were 62 percent of casualties while constituting 41 percent of the 13,000 employees — a male death rate 2.3 times the female rate — in the war’s first three weeks, when GMOH reported women and men dying at roughly the same rate (PDF p.126).
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Chapter 5 completed (PDF p.128-143): the “reliable media reports” added December 2023-March 23, 2024 were only 8 percent men among 14,602 deaths, while men were 52 percent of GMOH-listed casualties in the same period; when the UN on May 6, 2024 disregarded the Media Office-linked distribution, the identified women-and-children share dropped overnight from 69 to 52 percent; sudden additions repeatedly gave women and children more than the total increase (December 5, 2023: 1,353 of a 1,041 increase).
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Removals: GMOH admitted 3,952 previously verified names had been removed from its lists; the Henry Jackson Society found 6,394 names removed in all, 12.78 percent of GMOH’s total, including relatives of Yahya Sinwar and senior military-wing members; its spokesperson’s explanations included “Living people complained that they were registered as dead.” (PDF p.130-132)
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Natural deaths: GMOH announced in November 2024 that its lists included 1,800 natural deaths, corrected only after others noticed; the work infers 4,530 natural deaths in the reports from the age pattern of supposedly traumatic mortality among women and elderly men (PDF p.132-135).
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The provisional conclusion: “up to March 2025, the GMOH was deliberately engaged in both practices—undercounting combatant casualties and, in a quantitatively minor but qualitatively significant way, overcounting non-traumatic, age-related deaths”, while its total is not believed to be significantly higher or lower than reality, the divergence lying in gender and age distribution (PDF p.149-150).
Related pages
Debunking the Genocide Allegations: A Reexamination of the Israel-Hamas War from October 7, 2023 to June 1, 2025, Hamas, Genocide, Certainty mirage, Zeina Jamaluddine, Abraham Wyner, Henry Jackson Society, Michael Spagat, Khalil Shikaki, Gabriel Epstein