Many of those listed as war fatalities in Gaza actually died of natural causes or did not die at all, a Palestinian health official working for Hamas admitted on Saturday, following an analysis that showed massive discrepancies in casualty tallies.
The head of the statistics team at Gaza’s Hamas-controlled health ministry, Zaher al-Wahidi, made the admission to Sky News after an analysis by the HonestReporting nonprofit last week found that some 3,400 individuals listed as war casualties in earlier tallies had been dropped from the ministry’s latest update.
Comparing the October and August tallies to the March one, HonestReporting researcher Salo Aizenberg found “around 3,400 names missing” from the latest one, “including over 1,000 minors,” he told JNS.
“We realized that a lot of people died a natural death,” Wahidi told Sky News regarding the October tally. “Maybe they were near an explosion and they had a heart attack, or houses caused them pneumonia or hypothermia. All these cases we don’t [attribute to] the war,” he said.
According to Sky News, 1,852 people appearing in October’s official list of war fatalities were removed from the March one after it was found that some had died of natural causes or were alive but had been imprisoned. In total, 3,952 names have been removed in several corrections from Gaza’s reported death toll since the war began, according to the outlet.
Whereas the Gaza Health Ministry had previously admitted error that it attributed to reporting mechanism issues, it had not conceded that natural deaths were counted along with war casualties.
The March statistics changed the age distribution of reported fatalities in Gaza: Of all deaths recorded by Hamas between the ages of 13 to 55, which is the general combat age for Hamas fighters, 72% were male, according to the HonestReporting analysis.
Sky News in its analysis said that 44% of remaining deaths were “working-age men,” meaning men aged 18-60, while in the previous tally they comprised 41%. The percentage of women dropped from 19% in the November tally to 17% in the corrected March tally, according to Sky News. The list of deaths provided by the Hamas-run ministry stood at 50,609 on Saturday following the removals.
The Israel Defense Forces has said some 17,000 terrorists have been killed in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023, when approximately 6,000 Hamas terrorists invaded Israel, murdering some 1,200 people and abducting another 251. Israel launched an ongoing military campaign to dismantle Hamas and retrieve its hostages.
The admission that natural deaths had been included in the war casualty lists is “a major issue,” said Aizenberg. Before his work for HonestReporting, which focuses on exposing anti-Israel bias in the media, Aizenberg participated in the writing of a report on Gaza death statistics for the London-based Henry Jackson Society security think tank. That report from December indicated that the latest casualty figure at the time included the approximately 5,000 people who die of natural causes each year in the Gaza Strip.
To date, the Hamas-run ministry has not published a list of natural deaths since Oct. 7, 2023. The latest admission “means that every list that they’ve ever issued is a mix of war deaths and natural deaths,” said Aizenberg.
The Health Ministry figures also do not distinguish between combatants and noncombatants.
