Mortality in Gaza: lies and statistics

David Herman

The UN, UNWRA, WHO, numerous NGOs, senior British and American politicians and all the British mainstream news networks, including their flagship programmes, have all been consistently misleading people about the number of deaths in Gaza. But in the last month a series of articles in various publications have started to question this consensus. It is not clear why it has taken so long for this fightback, but what is clear is that the tide is turning.

One of the first major articles questioning the anti-Israel consensus was by Abrahm Wyner, an American mathematical statistician, and Professor of Statistics and Data Science at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Published in the American magazine Tablet on 7 March, his piece was called, “How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers”.

As Professor Wyner points out, “The main source for the data [about civilian deaths in Gaza] has been the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, which now claims more than 30,000 dead, the majority of which it says are children and women.” He begins by showing how influential the data from the Palestinian Health Authority has been. He quotes leading American politicians who have unquestioningly used these figures: “Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said the number was ‘over 25,000’…” Wyner writes. “President Biden himself had earlier cited this figure, asserting that ‘too many, too many of the over 27,000 Palestinians killed in this conflict have been innocent civilians and children, including thousands of children.’ The White House also explained that the President ‘was referring to publicly available data about the total number of casualties.’”

But, Wyner argues, “Here’s the problem with this data: The numbers are not real. That much is obvious to anyone who understands how naturally occurring numbers work. The casualties are not overwhelmingly women and children, and the majority may be Hamas fighters.”

There are a number of things that are odd about the figures from the Palestinian Health Authority, he writes. First, the graph of total deaths has been increasing since October “with almost metronomical linearity.” There have been no irregularities or inconsistencies in the figures (see the graph below, taken from Wyner’s article):

Or, as Wyner puts it, “The graph reveals an extremely regular increase in casualties over the period. … This regularity is almost surely not real. One would expect quite a bit of variation day to day. In fact, the daily reported casualty count over this period averages 270, plus or minus about 15%. This is strikingly little variation. There should be days with twice the average or more and others with half or less.”

Secondly, Wyner writes, “we should see variation in the number of child casualties that tracks the variation in the number of women. This is because the daily variation in death counts is caused by the variation in the number of strikes on residential buildings and tunnels which should result in considerable variability in the totals but less variation in the percentage of deaths across groups. This is a basic statistical fact about chance variability.” “Consequently,” he continues, “on the days with many women casualties there should be large numbers of children casualties, and on the days when just a few women are reported to have been killed, just a few children should be reported.” In other words, “The daily number of children reported to have been killed is totally unrelated [my emphasis] to the number of women reported.”

Thirdly, “The daily number of women casualties should be highly correlated with the number of non-women and non-children (i.e., men) reported. Again, this is expected because of the nature of battle. The ebbs and flows of the bombings and attacks by Israel should cause the daily count to move together. But that is not what the data show. Not only is there not a positive correlation, there is a strong negative correlation, which makes no sense at all and establishes the third piece of evidence that the numbers are not real.”

What do these anomalies suggest, asks Wyner? They are “highly suggestive that a process unconnected or loosely connected to reality was used to report the numbers. Most likely, the Hamas ministry settled on a daily total arbitrarily. We know this because the daily totals increase too consistently to be real. Then they assigned about 70% of the total to be women and children, splitting that amount randomly from day to day. Then they in-filled the number of men as set by the predetermined total. This explains all the data observed.”

Fourth, “The Gaza Health Ministry has consistently claimed that about 70% of the casualties are women or children. This total is far higher than the numbers reported in earlier conflicts with Israel. Another red flag, raised by Salo Aizenberg and written about extensively, is that if 70% of the casualties are women and children and 25% of the population is adult male, then either Israel is not successfully eliminating Hamas fighters or adult male casualty counts are extremely low. This by itself strongly suggests that the numbers are at a minimum grossly inaccurate and quite probably outright faked.”

“Taken together,” Wyner continues, “Hamas is reporting not only that 70% of casualties are women and children but also that 20% are fighters. This is not possible unless Israel is somehow not killing noncombatant men, or else Hamas is claiming that almost all the men in Gaza are Hamas fighters.” (Perhaps they are, ed.)

Wyner concludes, “The total civilian casualty count is likely to beextremely overstated [my emphasis]. Israel estimates that at least 12,000 fighters have been killed.(This is the number of terrorists estimated killed by the beginning of March and is now much higher, while thousands more have been taken prisoner and provided information, ed.) If that number proves to be even reasonably accurate, then the ratio of noncombatant casualties to combatants is remarkably low: at most 1.4 to 1 and perhaps as low as 1 to 1. By historical standards of urban warfare, where combatants are embedded above and below into civilian population centers, this is a remarkable and successful effort to prevent unnecessary loss of life while fighting an implacable enemy that protects itself with civilians.”

In the same month, Fathom journal published a piece entitled “Statistically Impossible: A Critical Analysis of Hamas’s Women and Children Casualty Figures” by Tom Simpson, Lewi Stone and Gregory Rose.

The authors begin, “On 29 February 2024, the Gazan Ministry of Health announced that the ongoing war had resulted in 30,022 Gazan casualties, 70 per cent of whom are women and children.” Later they write, “The Gazan Ministry of Health (MoH) has repeatedly claimed that 70 per cent of Gazan deaths are women and children. We first found the claim in the MoH’s 11 December 2023 report.[1] In 2024, the MoH has repeated this claim in all seven of its reports that we have been able to obtain so far this year (see Figure 2). The 70 per cent figure has also been widely cited in the media, with a recent BBC factcheck even using it to criticise IDF statistics on eliminated Hamas combatants. But how trustworthy is the 70 per cent statistic?”

Their answer is: not at all. “It turns out this ‘70 per cent’ figure is contradicted by the statistics that the MoH itself provides in its own reports. It is a disinformation tool founded on statistical manipulation rather than realities on the ground. The BBC ‘factcheckers’ and other western media could easily have determined this for themselves, using publicly available information.” They go on, “According to a 29 February MoH report, of 30,228 total deaths, only 17,285 were identified and registered in hospitals. The other 12,943 (43 per cent) were unregistered and collected solely from ‘reliable media sources,’ ‘though the ministry doesn’t cite or say which sources those are,’ as emphasised by Aya Batrawi, an NPR journalist covering the conflict.”

There is another more disturbing puzzle, according to the Fathom article: “Even by the MoH’s own dubious figures, the rate of death in Gaza appears to have slowed markedly in recent months. This correlates with a decline in the reported ratio of women and children killed. The aforementioned 21,978 total dead figure for 2023 implies that, on average, 259 Gazans died every day between 7 October and 31 December. As of 3 March, the comparable 2024 figure declined to 136. So even by Hamas’s own statistics, there has been a decline of almost 50 per cent in the rate of death. The proportion of women and children casualties recorded in hospitals has also declined by about a third, from 60 per cent in 2023 down to 42 per cent of the deaths recorded in 2024 – a far cry from the BBC’s proclaimed 70 per cent.”

On March 26, Jason Epstein wrote a third major article questioning the conventional wisdom about mortality statistics in Gaza, “Gaza Fatality Data has Become Completely Unreliable”. Epstein is a research assistant in the Washington Institute’s Koret Project on Arab-Israel Relations.

“MOH statistics,” he writes, “do not appear to offer a reliable guide to the actual Palestinian death toll even by the ‘foggy’ standards of normal wartime reporting. Journalists, analysts, and government officials need to be aware that the actual overall death toll may be significantly higher (or, less likely, lower) than what the MOH has reported; the demographic composition of these fatalities is certainly far different than what the MOH claims.”

Epstein concludes, first, “Whether through passive omission, active manipulation, or both, the Gaza Health Ministry’s media reports methodology significantly understates the number of men killed and may overstate the number of children killed.” Second, “The repeated claim that 72% of the dead are women and children is very likely incorrect [his emphasis]. Data from the central collection system indicates that 58% of those killed since the start of the war are women and children; this figure drops to 48% for those killed since November 3. For the 72% claim to be accurate, women and children would have to make up about 90% of deaths recorded from media reports. This proportion is implausible—men comprise a quarter of the population, and these fatalities have largely occurred in areas with fewer civilians and more combatants, most of whom are adult men.” Third, “Data from both methodologies suggests that the war has decreased in intensity [his emphasis]. Fatalities have declined from an average of 348 per day in the first weeks of the war to around 85 per day in March.

Finally, The existing data is too limited to allow for definitive conclusions about the true death toll or the civilian-combatant ratio [his emphasis]. A high proportion of reported deaths come from an unknown methodology that may be misrepresenting the data, while enormous uncertainty persists regarding how many combatant fatalities go uncounted in tunnels and other battlespaces. The exact proportions of men, women, and children killed are even more unclear. The available data does not allow for reliable estimates about the ratio of civilians to combatants killed either, whether independently or by comparison with Israeli estimates.”

These are just three articles published in the past few weeks which have offered a devastating analysis of the mortality statistics in Gaza produced by the Palestinian Health Authority, a front for Hamas. But perhaps what is most astonishing is that these figures have been accepted unquestioningly and constantly recycled by BBC News, Channel 4 News, Sky News, the UN and all its subsidiaries, numerous politicians on both sides of the Atlantic. None of these organisations or individuals have, to my knowledge, cited these articles, nor, bizarrely, have they subjected the Hamas figures to the slightest critical scrutiny.

This is only part of the systemic anti-Israel bias we have seen in our media and from many of our leading politicians since October. Why has this happened? I can only think of one reasonable explanation. The editors and producers of these programmes are indeed biased against Israel. They wish to exaggerate civilian casualties in Gaza and have been reluctant to interview or even consult leading statisticians on both sides of the Atlantic about the morality figures produced by Hamas.

Reposted with the writer’s permission fronTheArticle, “a website which helps you make sense of the news through free access to exchanges of ideas, rather than echo chambers of prejudice. We have no ideological agenda and we promise never to tell you what to think. Our aim is simply to preserve the integrity of the free press…by embracing nuance and complexity – and showing the world in all its shades of grey. To read /TheArticle is to see a story from every angle with no abuse, no extremism – and proper editing.”