A senior Palestinian health official from Hamas’s Health Ministry admitted that Gaza’s war fatality counts have included individuals who died of natural causes—or were later found to be alive. The admission followed a detailed analysis highlighting major inconsistencies in the reported casualty figures.
Speaking to Sky News, Zaher al-Wahidi, head of the statistics team at the Hamas-run Health Ministry, said, “We realized that a lot of people died a natural death.” He added that some individuals may have had heart attacks near explosions or suffered from conditions such as pneumonia or hypothermia, which he claims the ministry no longer attributes to the war.
The revelation comes after the nonprofit HonestReporting published findings last week indicating that approximately 3,400 names previously listed as war casualties in Gaza were absent from the ministry’s most recent death tally. The organization’s researcher, Salo Aizenberg, discovered that the March casualty report showed a significantly lower number than previous tallies from October and August, including more than 1,000 minors who were no longer listed.
According to Sky News, 1,852 people who had appeared in the October war deaths list were removed from the March version, with explanations ranging from natural deaths to being found alive but imprisoned. In total, 3,952 names have been removed through various corrections since the conflict began on October 7, 2023.
This marks the first time the Hamas-run Health Ministry has publicly admitted to including natural deaths in its wartime statistics. Previously, discrepancies were blamed solely on reporting mechanism flaws.
The revised figures have also altered the demographic breakdown of reported fatalities. According to HonestReporting, 72% of those listed as deceased between the ages of 13 and 55—a typical combat age range for Hamas—were male. Sky News reported that the proportion of “working-age men” (ages 18-60) in the death count rose from 41% in November to 44% in March, while the share of women dropped from 19% to 17%.
Despite the removals, the total death toll published by the Gaza Health Ministry this past Saturday still stood at 50,609.
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2 Responses
Your beloved Republicans gave Gaza to Hamas in 2005.
This report actually makes the numbers given by the Hamas controlled ministry of health more credible, as it actually has the numbers being based on actual people who were counted as dead. Throughout the war people had good reason to suspect they were making up their numbers out of whole cloth. This report shows that the numbers they gave were not only real but that whoever is in charge of maintaining them wants them to be precise to the point of removing some of the dead based on reassessing their count.