Despite All Evidence, BBC Still Defends Hamas Casualty Figures

In the early hours of April 23, the BBC News website published a report by the BBC Jerusalem bureau’s Yolande Knell under the headline “Gaza health ministry denies manipulating death toll figures.”

Only in paragraph eight do readers discover the purpose of Knell’s report:

Recently, several media reports have raised questions about the reliability of the statistics by highlighting anomalies between the August and October 2024 and March 2025 lists of fatalities. The reports focus on how some 3,000 names of people originally identified as fatalities were removed from later revised lists.

Among those media reports is an article titled “Hamas ‘quietly drops’ thousands of deaths from casualty figures” — which was published by the Telegraph on April 1 — and cites research carried out by Salo Aizenberg showing that 3,374 names, including over a thousand children, had been dropped from Hamas’ March 2025 list of supposedly identified and confirmed casualties.

On April 5, Sky News published a report titled “Hundreds of names removed from official Gaza war death list” which quotes “[t]he head of the statistics team at Gaza’s health ministry, Zaher Al Wahidi”:

Almost all of the names removed (97%) had initially been submitted through an online form which allows families to record the deaths of loved ones where the body is missing. […]

“We realised that a lot of people [submitted via the form] died a natural death,” Mr Wahidi said. “Maybe they were near an explosion and they had a heart attack, or [living in destroyed] houses caused them pneumonia or hypothermia. All these cases we don’t [attribute to] the war.”

Others submitted via the form were found to be imprisoned or to be missing with insufficient evidence that they had died.

Some families submitting false claims, Mr Wahidi said, may have been motivated by the promise of government financial assistance.

Over two weeks later, the same Hamas health ministry statistician (who, as readers may recall, was credited by the authors of a paper published at the Lancet in January 2025) was quoted in Yolande Knell’s report:

A Gazan health official, Zaher al-Wahidi, denied to the BBC that victims had vanished or that there was a lack of transparency, insisting: “The health ministry works towards having accurate data with high credibility.

“In every list that gets shared, there is a greater verification and revision of the list. We cannot say that the health ministry removes names. It’s not a removal process, rather it is a revision and verification process.”

Al-Wahidi’s admission that the names on successive lists are subject to revision and verification is ample indication of the reliability of those lists and the ensuing statistics that the BBC has uncritically quoted and promoted as being reliable for the past 18 months, in line with an editorial policy that has existed at least since 2014.

Knell’s report later includes the following quote:

“It seems like they’re actually updating the lists more in real time, as more information appears,” says Professor Mike Spagat of Royal Holloway College, chair of Every Casualty Counts, an independent civilian casualty monitoring organisation. “We should have regarded the previous lists as a little bit more provisional than I had assumed.” [emphasis added]

The Sky News report includes a quote from the same person:

“”This does cause me to downgrade the quality of the earlier lists, definitely below where I thought they were,” said Professor Michael Spagat, chair of Every Casualty Counts, an independent civilian casualty monitoring organisation.”

Nevertheless, Knell suggests to her readers that the Hamas-supplied figures can be considered reliable because they are used by “UN agencies” and “the media”:

The figures are cited with attribution, by UN agencies and widely in the media.

While Knell does note the failure of the Hamas supplied data to distinguish between civilians and combatants, she does not explain that that policy is deliberate and long-standing:

The list does not distinguish between civilians and members of Palestinian armed groups who are killed in the war, and Israel has accused Hamas of inflating the percentages of women and children.

Neither does she clarify that the Hamas-supplied lists most likely include casualties caused by shortfall missiles launched by Gaza Strip-based terrorist organizations as well as Gazans killed or executed by Hamas.

Knell’s reference to Hamas “inflating the percentages of women and children” as solely an Israeli accusation fails to inform BBC audiences that for months on end, BBC journalists promoted Hamas claims that 70% of the casualties were women and children, despite the absence of verified data to support that claim.

Later in her report, Knell states:

Israel periodically estimates the number of Palestinian fighters killed. At the start of this year, it assessed that 20,000 members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad were among the dead. In mid-April it said there had been “more than 100 targeted eliminations” in the past month.

She however fails to inform her readers that in February 2024, the BBC dismissed Israeli assessments of the number of terrorists killed by citing the same 70% women and children mantra which it later abandoned.

Members of the corporation’s funding public may be wondering why the BBC News website chose to publish this report by Yolande Knell, given that it has no new information to add to what was provided in the Sky News report published 16 days earlier.

One possible explanation lies in the fact that for 18 months, the BBC has uncritically quoted and promoted Hamas’ claims concerning casualty figures, despite faulty methodology, changes in the methodology used, repeated removals of names, the inclusion of natural deaths and people killed in previous rounds of conflict, and the absence of independent verification.

This report by Knell would appear to be just yet another chapter in the BBC’s repeated attempts to justify that dubious editorial policy.

Hadar Sela is the co-editor of CAMERA UK – an affiliate of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA), where a version of this article first appeared. 

The post Despite All Evidence, BBC Still Defends Hamas Casualty Figures first appeared on Algemeiner.com.