You're Being Misled About the Gaza Death Toll | Opinion

We all grieve the horrendous loss of life in the Israel-Hamas war. And it is imperative that news organizations provide an accurate description of who those casualties are—and who is responsible.

Major news organizations including NPR, CNN, CBS, and NBC repeatedly state that over 20,000 have been killed in Gaza. Yet they usually omit that this figure comes from the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry and includes at least 8,000 Hamas terrorists. The Gaza Health Ministry, by its own admission, doesn't distinguish between combatant and civilian deaths. Instead, the Gaza Health Ministry includes combatants in its total death toll. In fact, that 8,000 figure, which accounts for 40 percent of the casualties, might be low; looking at the 2014 Israel-Hamas war, human rights organizations, including those that routinely criticize Israel, found that up to 60 percent of deaths had been combatants.

The "Gaza Health Ministry" also does not distinguish between Palestinians killed by Israel and those killed by Hamas. Rockets launched from within Gaza fail often, landing back inside Gaza. As even Human Rights Watch acknowledged, the rockets used by Hamas "are prone to misfire" and "have misfired and struck areas in Gaza." Research has consistently found that up to 20 percent of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) rockets land in Gaza. Given that there have been over 12,000 rockets fired from Gaza by Hamas and PIJ since October 7, this means nearly 2,500 terrorist-launched rockets have crashed in the densely populated Gaza Strip.

The highest reported casualty event of the war was the explosion at the Al-Ahli hospital on October 17. Yet the AP, Human Rights Watch, and U.S. and French intelligence all concluded that the explosions there were the result of a failed rocket launched by a Palestinian terrorist group from within Gaza. And still, the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry states that 471 Palestinians died at the hospital from "Israeli aggression."

Israeli soldiers on the ground seek to shoot terrorist combatants while avoiding civilians. Yet this effort to avoid shooting civilians is made incredibly difficult because Hamas soldiers routinely fight in civilian clothing—a violation of the laws of armed conflict.

Furthermore, media reports almost never mention that Hamas has a long history of recruiting and using child soldiers. Footage recently seized during Israel's operations in the Khan Younis area of Gaza found extensive documentation of the use of child soldiers, including videos of minors being used by Hamas to transfer explosives and use automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades.

The U.S. State Department's 2023 human trafficking also reports that "armed wings of Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas have allegedly recruited and used children."

Hamas's long history of training children to kill, arming them, and sending them into combat makes it even more difficult for Israeli soldiers to discern combatant from civilian. When a child soldier dies, blame should fall on Hamas for using children in battle in contravention of international law. Instead, the Gaza Health Ministry includes the death of child soldiers in their toll of child death, for which they blame Israel.

It is a tragedy every time a child is killed in war, which is precisely why Hamas's use of child soldiers is a war crime.

Hamas's tactics are designed to maximize civilian casualties in Gaza, a horrific reality stated plainly by Hamas's own leaders, who admit that the group uses Gaza's civilians as human shields and even argue that Hamas has no obligation to protect Gaza's civilians.

After October 7, Hamas occupied parts of southern Israel and could have stayed there and fought the IDF. They could have had their war without civilian casualties, except for the 1,200 Israelis killed on October 7. Instead, all Hamas fighters retreated behind their human shields and deployed themselves in the most populated areas of Gaza.

Hamas continues to launch rockets that kill more Gazans than Israelis, operate out of Gaza's civilian infrastructure, and blur the lines between combatants and civilians by fighting in plainclothes and using child soldiers.

We all want the bloodshed in Gaza to end immediately. This requires not the temporary ceasefire that we have already experienced, but a permanent and durable ceasefire. High ranking Hamas officials have forthrightly declared the reason they want a ceasefire is to regroup, rearm, and "repeat October 7." A durable ceasefire can only be achieved when Hamas releases the hostages and agrees to relocate away from Israel's borders, just as the Palestinian Liberation Organization relocated 8,000 of its fighters to Tunisia and elsewhere in 1982.

Until then, Hamas will continue to bear responsibility for the tragic loss of civilian life in Israel and in Gaza.

Rep. Brad Sherman represents California's 32nd district (Los Angeles County) and serves as a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.