The Media Lied That 83% of Gaza Deaths Were Civilians. How Viral Did That Lie Go?
The most glaring flaw in +972's report is its reliance on a database that the report itself admits is incomplete. Yet a social media analysis found that the lie may have reached over 6 billion people
A recent report by the anti-Israel publication +972 Magazine, claiming that 83% of Gaza casualties were civilians based on leaked Israeli intelligence data, has gone viral across social media platforms despite containing fundamental and easily-provable methodological flaws that render its central claim baseless.
The report claims that according to data obtained in May 2025, the Israeli army believed it had killed around 8,900 terror operatives since October 7. The report, co-published with another Israeli outlet titled Local Call and The Guardian, demonstrates how incomplete data and faulty analysis can be weaponized to create misleading narratives about the Israel-Hamas War.
According to a comprehensive social media analysis conducted by Jewish Onliner from August 21-23, 2025, posts containing the keywords "83%” (or "83 percent) along with "Gaza" or "Palestinians," generated 96,700 posts with 759,700 interactions and a potential reach of 6.6 billion people. The narrative was heavily pushed by influencers such as Abier Khatib, who celebrated Hamas's October 7 massacre and has promoted libels about Israel harvesting the skin of Palestinians, and Aaron Maté, a journalist previously identified as a prolific spreader of Syria-related disinformation.
The Incomplete Database Problem
The most glaring flaw in +972's report is its reliance on a database that the report itself admits is incomplete. According to +972, the leaked Israeli intelligence database is maintained by the Military Intelligence Directorate (known by the Hebrew acronym "Aman") and is described by intelligence sources as "the only authoritative tally of militant casualty figures." However, this database contains only 47,653 names of Palestinians considered active in the military wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).
One notable issue is that Gaza hosts multiple other active terrorist organizations, several of which participated in the October 7 attack and the ensuing war. Furthermore, the database excludes the political wings of these terror groups, administrative personnel, and support staff of these organizations.
As documented by Newsweek and other analysts, additional terror groups in Gaza include:
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) - Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades
Popular Resistance Committees - Al-Nasser Salah ad-Din Brigades
Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades
Palestinian Mujahideen Movement - Mujahideen Brigades
Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) - National Resistance Brigades
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC) - Jihad Jibril Brigades
The Admission of Undercounting
Even +972's own report acknowledges the database significantly undercounts the terrorist-combatant casualties: "The intelligence sources explained that the total number of militants killed is likely higher than the number recorded in the internal database, since it does not include Hamas or PIJ operatives who were killed but could not be identified by name, Gazans who took part in fighting but were not officially members of Hamas or PIJ, nor political figures in Hamas such as mayors and government ministers.” This admission alone invalidates the 83% calculation, as it confirms the denominator (combatant deaths) is artificially deflated.
Expert Analysis Exposes the Logical Fallacies
Data analyst and Honest Reporting board member Salo Aizenberg identified multiple fundamental flaws in the +972 analysis. He argued that the article treats Hamas casualty figures as reliable despite these numbers containing deaths from natural causes, Hamas-inflicted casualties, underage fighters, and other problematic inclusions, while incorrectly suggesting Israel endorses Hamas data when Israeli officials have explicitly rejected it.
Aizenberg also noted +972's consistent methodology of prioritizing unnamed and unofficial Israeli military sources while minimizing official statements from identified officials that undermine their conclusions. He observed how the publication emphasized the military's initial non-committal response while downplaying the subsequent official rejection of their findings.
Most significantly, Aizenberg identified a logical contradiction expressed by the author of the article, Yuval Abraham. Abraham acknowledged that Hamas casualty figures likely undercount total deaths due to bodies remaining buried under rubble, yet this same logic should apply to combatant deaths, meaning many killed fighters would also be unidentified and uncounted in any database.
Aizenberg further argued that Israeli forces often eliminate terror cells in tunnels, weapon teams, and bomb-makers without being able to identify all the casualties by name. He criticized the report's underlying assumption that if a combatant killed cannot be specifically identified by name during war, they should be classified as a civilian—a standard applied uniquely to Israel. Rather than disproving higher combatant casualty numbers, Aizenberg argued that identifying 8,900 combatants by name actually helps corroborate estimates of 20,000 or more combatants killed.
Another analysis detailed by Gilead Ini, senior research analyst at Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA), identified critical logical fallacies in the +972 report. Ini pointed out that the analysis commits basic errors in reasoning by assuming that incomplete data proves the absence of information, rather than simply reflecting the limitations of the database. He noted that there are new recruits who might not be on the Israeli list, and that the report fails to account for unknown categories that would be standard in serious casualty analysis. Ini concluded that the 83% figure is baseless and represents a deliberate misuse of logical reasoning to reach predetermined conclusions.
Historical Context of Casualty Manipulation
The problems with the 83% claim must be understood within the broader context of systematic casualty manipulation by Hamas and its supporters. The +972 report relies heavily on casualty figures from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, despite extensive documentation of manipulation and inaccuracies in these numbers.
A comprehensive December 2024 report by the Henry Jackson Society documented serious problems with the Ministry's casualty lists, including age misclassifications (a 22-year-old registered as a four-year-old), gender errors (men registered as female), pre-war deaths, natural deaths from cancer and other causes, and deaths caused by Hamas rather than the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).
The Social Media Disinformation Campaign
Among the top influencers amplifying the "83%" narrative was Abier Khatib. Khatib made numerous posts on October 7, 2023, praising Hamas's massacre, including celebrating Israeli civilians being kidnapped by Hamas and sharing Hamas propaganda of the attack.
Another key amplifier was Aaron Maté, a journalist with The Grayzone who has denied evidence of Hamas sexual crimes on October 7 as “fraudulent." A 2022 study by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that Maté was a prolific spreader of disinformation as part of a Russia-backed network that sent thousands of disinformation tweets to distort the reality of the Syrian conflict.
Disinformation Warfare in Action
The +972 Magazine report represents a textbook case of disinformation warfare: taking leaked information, applying flawed methodology to reach predetermined conclusions, and being amplified by bad actors while avoiding serious scrutiny.
The report's fundamental flaws—relying on incomplete data, ignoring multiple terrorist organizations, and accepting manipulated Hamas casualty figures—render its central 83% claim mathematically and logically invalid.
The viral success of such obviously flawed analysis demonstrates the ongoing challenge of countering disinformation campaigns that exploit social media algorithms to spread anti-Israel narratives regardless of factual basis.
The UN lied, media lied, academia lied, Hamas lied and the EU lied. Revoke their mother lying visas!