thinc. Senior Fellow Professor Gregory Rose has co-authored, with Professor Lewi Stone, a very important report published by Henry Jackson Society on the casualty figures in the Gaza Strip.
The Hamas Ministry of Health in Gaza began releasing datasets in the first month of the Hamas war with Israel in October 2023. The data analysed in this report covers all these datasets, including the most recently published dataset on 25 March 2025, which sets out a list of 50,021 claimed casualties.
In this paper, the authors present some of the many technical problems with the data, shed light on the manner in which the data reflected the casualties of the war and contribute to the understanding of how the mechanics of disinformation operate in contemporary urban warfare.
Comparisons of MoH datasets with those published by foreign academic epidemiologists and foreign doctors visiting Gaza showed that the epidemiological forecasts and visiting doctors’ impressions were hugely inconsistent with MoH-reported data for Gazan mortalities and injuries, greatly exaggerating their projections and accounts of impacts of civilian casualties.
At the core of this all is the realisation that the inevitability of Hamas’s military defeat was hitched to a civilian sacrifice strategy to prosecute a narrative of Israeli war atrocities. The Ministry’s messaging was definite and consistent in alleging genocide, and it was internationally persuasive. Although acceptance of the narrative was likely aided by hostility to the existence of Israel in significant parts of the world, Hamas’s successful practices demonstrated how disinformation can seize strategic victory from military defeat in asymmetrical armed conflict. The Ministry of Health’s highly detailed datasets were Hamas’s main wartime achievement in the months after 7 October 2023.
Read the article here
See also an article on this topic by the same authors in Quadrant Online:
