The fact that Israel-haters consistently try to conceal is that Hamas’s numbers do not distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths, which is vitally important. Simply stating that 70,000 people have died in two years of war is intentionally misleading, as the insinuation is that Israeli forces are slaughtering civilians en masse.
The reality is that, last August, the
IDF estimated it had killed at least 23,600 terrorists since Oct. 7, 2023, or 38 per cent of the 62,000 Gazans that the Health Ministry claimed had died up to that point.
The Health Ministry numbers also don’t distinguish between those who have been killed as a result of Israeli actions and those who perished in “friendly fire” incidents, such as the 471 who were reported dead after an errant terrorist rocket hit the
Al-Ahli Arab Hospital.
Even if we take both sides’ August 2025 numbers at face value and count every dead civilian as a war death, it would indicate that civilians accounted for 62 per cent of the war dead. This number is certainly high, but still lower than
estimates for the Korean War (74 per cent), the Gulf War (87-88 per cent) and the Iraq War (66-67 per cent).
It is also lower than the 67 per cent civilian
death rate in the October 7 massacre, so anyone screaming about “proportionality” should check their facts.
There is no doubt that the harms caused to civilians in Gaza are much higher than they should be, but that is because Hamas embeds terrorist infrastructure in civilian areas, including neighbourhoods, schools, hospitals and mosques. Even so, Hamas’s persistent claim that the overwhelming majority of deaths are women and children is likely a complete fabrication.
An April 2025
report written by two Australian academics and published by the U.S.-based Henry Jackson Society examined the Health Ministry’s own data and
found that, between October 2023 and March 2025, 51 per cent of the casualties were women and children — a far cry from the 70 per cent that Hamas’s Government Media Office has been claiming throughout the war and media outlets have been repeating ad nauseam.
When specifically examining the effects of Israel’s military operation in Khan Younis, the researchers found that males between the ages of 15 and 40 were over-represented, and that females under the age of 18 made up nine per cent of the fatalities, while underage boys constituted 13 per cent.
This shows that the vast majority of the dead were fighting-age males — which one would expect to see in a war, but not in a genocide. The higher percentage of underage boys also indicates that many of them were not innocent children who happened to get caught in the crossfire, but child soldiers brandishing AK-47s.
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Indeed, Palestinian terrorist groups like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad have
a long history of recruiting child soldiers, dating back to the Second Intifada, when they were used as suicide bombers.
Before the war, Hamas ran
annual summer camps, attended by tens of thousands of children, to “prepare the youth” to make “sacrifices.” These, according to the
U.S. State Department, “involved firearm instruction and military training,” and “served as recruitment events.” And during the war, Israel
found hard evidence that “minors are active in the military wings of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip.”
Part of the disconnect stems from the fact that while the Gaza Health Ministry is responsible for collecting data, the numbers are often spun by Hamas’s propaganda arm, the Government Media Office. Even if the baseline death toll is relatively trustworthy, it’s completely irresponsible of the global media to unquestioningly parrot Hamas’s claims about women and children being over-represented among the dead.
Whether Hamas's official death toll is correct or not, it is not evidence of Israeli war crimes
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And even if it’s true that over 70,000 have died since the start of the war, this cannot be construed as evidence that Israel is perpetrating a genocide. Even being generous and assuming that 10,000 people are buried under the rubble and have yet to be added to the death count, the number of dead after more than two years of war still only represents around 3.7 per cent of Gaza’s population of 2.2 million.
By
comparison, the global Jewish population was reduced by 34 per cent during the Holocaust, and in Rwanda, the two-year genocide in the early 1990s caused the population to decrease by 28 per cent.
It’s telling that Hamas and its useful idiots in the West were accusing Israel of “genocide” on October 7, before its military campaign even got underway, despite the fact that the Palestinian population in the territories increased by 336 per cent between 1967 and 2017.
There has clearly been a concerted effort on the part of Hamas and its backers to push the narrative that Israel is committing crimes against humanity in order to gain sympathy in West and among world leaders, even though the data shows that there has never been a systematic attempt to eliminate Palestinians — not before the war, and not after.
People on both sides of the debate should have a keen interest in knowing the truth, yet Israel’s enemies only seem interested in peddling lies intended to demonize the Jewish state.
The war in Gaza has unquestionably caused an immense amount of human suffering and we should all support current efforts to bring a lasting peace to the region. Yet we cannot begin to mend the deep wounds this war has caused — both in the Middle East and here at home — if we cannot be honest about what we know, what we don’t know and what the data is actually telling us.
On that note, Humanity “now has a common enemy,”
United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese told the Al Jazeera Forum via video link on Saturday night during her speech condemning Israel.
United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese claimed that "international law has been stabbed in the heart" and accused Israel of being the "common enemy" of humanity.
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'Francesca Albanese exploits her position at the UN to echo terrorist propaganda and antisemitism,' Danon's post read. 'And if what she has done so far was not enough, she is expected to speak at the Al Jazeera forum alongside the chief murderer who heads the Hamas terrorist organization, Khaled Mashaal.'
