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We've been reading accusations of "genocide" against Israel for months, without any court having endorsed any of them.
These accusations are based primarily on Hamas's manipulated death toll, dismantled in 2024 by a statistics professor and admitted as false by the UN a few months later (despite which many, including the UN itself, have continued to spread them without any verification).
In this disinformation campaign, the spreaders of this hoax display a clear inconsistency when it comes to assessing what genocide is. As we saw here recently, the far left launched the "genocide" hoax when there were more deaths in Israel than in Gaza. On the other hand, that same end of the political map refused to condemn as "genocide" the extermination of Christians and Yazidis by ISIS terrorists in Iraq a decade ago and even refused to condemn the crimes of communism, with more than 100 million dead.
As for numbers, a multitude of media outlets have been reporting the figure of 65,000 dead in Gaza, a figure supplied by Hamas terrorists, which controls the so-called "Gaza Ministry of Health," which is the source of that figure. Significantly, that figure does not specify how many of the dead were Hamas terrorists, nor the causes of those deaths (remember that Hamas has been launching rockets at Israel, many of which have fallen in the Palestinian territories, causing casualties that Hamas attributes to Israel).
On this issue, Salo Aizenberg, a graduate in Management Information Systems and contributor to NGOs such as UN Watch and NGO Monitor, published a detailed article on September 29 analyzing Hamas's death toll. For your information, I reproduce his analysis below:
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by Salo Aizenberg
As of September 25, 2025, Hamas claims that 65,400 people have been killed in Gaza by the war since 10/7. Over time, it has released eleven separate lists of names, most recently on August 4. These lists have been “cleaned up” by removing obvious early errors such as missing and false IDs, yet the core problems remain: no identification of combatants, no cause, place, or date of death for anyone (though Hamas appears to maintain this data), and no effort to separate natural deaths, deaths caused by IDF action, and fatalities caused by Hamas.
This latest analysis builds on two years of close monitoring of fatality data, beginning with my debunking in December 2023 of the false claim that “70% of those killed in Gaza are women and children,” which is now widely recognized as a Hamas falsification. I have analyzed every major study and investigative report on Gaza fatalities, reviewed each of the Hamas-published lists in detail, and scrutinized and debunked preposterous claims of inflated casualty numbers. I have cross-checked these figures with IDF statements, demographic data, and media investigations. The goal is to strip away the noise and arrive at a more grounded estimate. The chart below summarizes the results of this latest analysis.
Unpacking Hamas' Headline Number
Hamas’ headline figure of 65,400 deaths is presented as if all were war fatalities caused by the IDF. In reality, the number certainly includes thousands of natural deaths and cases of infant mortality. Pre-10/7 data from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics show that Gaza records about 6,000 natural deaths and 800 infant deaths annually. For the first eighteen months of the war Hamas insisted that every name on its lists represented a war casualty, but in April 2025 it quietly admitted otherwise. After removing a set of names from its rolls, Zaher al-Wahidi of Hamas' Ministry of Health conceded to Sky News that “a lot of people… died a natural death” —an extraordinary admission after months of categorical denials.
While some natural deaths appear to have been dropped a few months ago, Hamas has never produced a separate record of natural deaths, even after nearly two years. If such a list existed, Hamas would have every incentive to release it, since it would show that total fatalities were even higher than the 65,400 they already claim and bolster their claim that all deaths listed are war related. The obvious explanation for its long absence is simple: no such list exists, because these deaths were never separated out in the first place going back to October 2023.
There is also clear evidence that non-war deaths are part of the count. Documented cases include victims of vehicle accidents, a wall collapse, and illnesses. Examples of these deaths placed on the Hamas lists have been confirmed through painstaking social-media analysis. The conclusion is unmistakable: Hamas has inflated its fatality list by sweeping in virtually every death in Gaza and assigning it to Israel. For this analysis I estimate 10,000 natural deaths are embedded in Hamas’ lists. This is lower than the statistical expectation of over 12,000, reflecting both the likelihood that some deaths never made it onto the list and the fact that Hamas removed some of these cases in 2025.
Another estimated 1,000 deaths can reasonably be attributed to errors and anomalies. The Hamas list still shows people killed in previous wars, individuals misidentified, and cancer patients who had actually left Gaza but were listed as dead. While most mistakes appear to have been corrected, a margin of error of one to two percent remains likely. And because Hamas refuses to provide cause, place, or verification of death, these errors remain hidden.
After removing natural deaths and errors and anomalies, we are left with 54,400 estimated war-related deaths since 10/7.
Internal Killings by Hamas & Gangs
Not every war time death in Gaza is attributable to Israel, a fact that has become increasingly clear in recent months. A significant share stems from Hamas’ own violence and the collapse of internal order: executions of alleged collaborators and looters, internal deadly clashes around aid convoys, friendly-fire, and misfired rockets that fell short inside Gaza. Estimates suggest that 10%-20% percent of the 10,000+ rockets launched since 10/7 have misfired, many likely landing in populated areas. Hamas killed 12 GHF aid workers in June 2025, and many deaths of aid seekers blamed on Israel were actually caused by Hamas. Hamas killed 50 fighters from a rival gang according to report in The Guardian. Independent observers have documented dozens of similar incidents carried out by Hamas and its Al-Sahm unit over the course of the war (see here, here and here).
Taken together, these strands of evidence, which include documented executions, internal battles, lethal crackdowns during looting and gang activity, and misfired rockets by Palestinian armed groups, support an estimate of 4,000 Gazans killed by Hamas or other internal violence. This specific number is admittedly less supportable than other figures in the analysis, but it reflects a reasonable assessment of the available evidence which shows consistent Hamas caused deaths beginning early in the war when rocket fire was most intense. These deaths are related to wartime but they are not the result of Israeli action. They must therefore be excluded from any honest accounting of IDF-caused fatalities. Subtracting them from the adjusted total leaves roughly 50,400 remaining war deaths in the dataset under review.
Adding Back Missing Combatant Deaths
The demographic breakdown from the latest Hamas fatality lists show a striking 3:1 excess of males of combat age among the dead. As of early September 2025, about 30,000 men aged 18 to 59 are listed as killed, compared to 10,000 women in the same age range. That is nearly 20,000 additional men in the core fighting-age population. Add to this about 2,000 excess deaths of teenage males, a group Hamas has relied on increasingly for recruits as its forces have been depleted. This pattern points clearly to large-scale targeted killings of combatants by the IDF rather than indiscriminate civilian deaths. The chart below from Hamas' July 2025 list shows the spike in combat age males including teenagers, which has grown even larger in the last 3 months.
The IDF has stated that about 24,000 Hamas fighters have been killed since the war began. This figure includes those killed during the 10/7 attacks inside Israel, 20,000 killed inside Gaza as of early 2025 according to then IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi, and several thousand more since then. Judged against the the visible collapse of Hamas’ military capabilities, the need to recruit 15,000 new fighters, and other battlefield indicators, this IDF estimate is credible and represents about half of the initial strength of Hamas and PIJ and about 36% taking into account new recruits and fighters from other groups. Claims that the IDF has only killed 8,900 combatants are demonstrably false, as they only include those that the IDF has identified by name. There is no way to use the "named combatant" data as a metric to assess how many unnamed fighters the IDF has killed, such as those buried under tunnels or more recent recruits.
In my analysis I do not treat every excess male death as a combatant, since some men in this age group were undoubtedly civilians. Thus, when the demographic evidence is reconciled with the IDF’s estimate of 24,000 combatants killed, the most reasonable conclusion is that thousands of fighters never appeared on Hamas’ fatality lists at all. My estimate of about 7,000 missing deaths reflects this reconciliation. Some of these may be non-combatants, but after two years most civilian deaths would already have been reported by families seeking recognition and compensation. The far more likely explanation is that Hamas has deliberately withheld the names of its fighters in order to disguise the scale of its battlefield losses, as has been reported. Adding back 7,000 unlisted fatalities, plus 4,000 persons killed by Hamas, produces an estimated total of 61,400 Gaza war deaths, excluding natural deaths. This is close to the headline 65,400 claimed by Hamas, but broken down far differently.
Conclusion
This latest analysis points to a grounded estimate of 57,400 war-related deaths due to IDF action, consisting of about 24,000 combatants and 33,400 civilians (plus additional deaths caused by Hamas). Civilian casualties are tragic and the large number of minors killed cannot be dismissed; but they are overwhelmingly the result of Hamas’ human shield strategy whereby it places its military assets where civilians are present.
The civilian-to-combatant ratio of 1.4 to 1 is remarkably low by historical standards of urban warfare in Iraq or Afghanistan, and it demonstrates that the IDF has waged a highly targeted campaign against Hamas under extraordinarily difficult conditions. Claims that large numbers of civilian deaths remain unreported do not hold up: families have had nearly two years to submit fatalities even without a body and via a phone call or Google form, and many “rubble” deaths were already added to the lists.
The evidence shows that Hamas’ headline fatality toll is a distortion, and that the true picture is of a war where Israel has inflicted massive losses on Hamas’ fighters while conducting one of the most targeted urban campaigns in modern history.
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Regarding what Salo Aizenberg comments at the end of the article, John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern Warfare Institute (MWI) at West Point who served for 25 years as an infantryman and two tours in the Iraq War, noted on March 26, 2024 in Newsweek:
"The UN, EU and other sources estimate that civilians usually account for 80 percent to 90 percent of casualties, or a 1:9 ratio, in modern war (though this does mix all types of wars). In the 2016-2017 Battle of Mosul, a battle supervised by the U.S. that used the world's most powerful airpower resources, some 10,000 civilians were killed compared to roughly 4,000 ISIS terrorists."
Thus, the proportion of civilian deaths in this war would be extraordinarily low despite Hamas's strategy of using the civilian population of Gaza as human shields. Therefore, it can be concluded that Israel not only has not committed genocide, but has waged war with a level of precision rarely achieved by other countries under similar conditions of urban warfare. Calling this "genocide" not only disregards the truth, but is also an absurdity that would entail calling most of the Allied urban warfare operations in World War II "genocide," an accusation that has never been raised by anyone, excluding nazi sympathizers.
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Photo: AP.
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