Hamas Officials Report 9,500 Missing Under Rubble as Ceasefire Begins, Exposing Months of Viral Misinformation
Hamas data reveals true scale after fabricated "Harvard study" spread false 400,000 missing claim worldwide
As the hostage release deal between Israel and Hamas is about to take effect, brokered by President Trump, new data from Hamas-controlled Gaza Civil Defense Agency claims that approximately 9,500 Palestinians remain missing under rubble across the territory. This figure stands in stark contrast to the viral misinformation that spread throughout the war, falsely claiming hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had “disappeared.”
The Harvard Study Misinterpretation
The most prominent piece of misinformation centered around claims of a “Harvard study” purporting to show that nearly 400,000 Palestinians went missing in Gaza since the start of the Israel-Hamas war. However, fact-checkers revealed Harvard University published no such study.
The false allegation originated from a misrepresentation of a report by Yaakov Garb, a professor at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University, published on Harvard Dataverse - an online repository where researchers can share work without university approval or affiliation requirements. Garb’s study examined aid distribution compounds in Gaza, not missing persons.
The false 377,000 figure became widespread from a Medium blog post by an author named “Maximilian,” who misinterpreted Garb’s population maps. The blogger subtracted current population estimates from pre-war figures, ignoring that approximately 100,000 Palestinians had left Gaza and that the Israeli military’s population estimates were not comprehensive.
“If anyone had asked me about these numbers I would have set things straight right away,” Garb told the Associated Press. “Instead the number was circulated and recirculated by people who had not read the report or stopped to think about it for a moment.”
High-Profile Amplifiers of Misinformation
UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese
Among the most prominent figures spreading the false claims was UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, who stated in an interview with El País that “400,000 people have disappeared” in Gaza.
Albanese has faced significant controversy for her role. The US Mission to the United Nations condemned her “malignant antisemitism and support for terrorism,” declaring her “unfit to serve as Special Rapporteur.”
Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)
The Council on American-Islamic Relations amplified the false claims, stating that “at least 377,000 people in Gaza have been ‘disappeared’ by the Israeli military, with half of that number believed to be children.”
CAIR has recently faced intense scrutiny over its alleged ties to terrorist organizations and activities. Senator Tom Cotton has petitioned the IRS to investigate CAIR’s tax-exempt status, citing “ties to terrorist organizations, including Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.” The organization was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in a 2009 federal terrorism financing case.
Jewish Onliner’s investigation previously exposed that CAIR is orchestrating a coordinated national campaign across six states—Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Florida, and Illinois—to influence US public school curricula. The campaign includes lesson plans that specifically instruct teachers to avoid using terms like “Islamic terrorists” and “jihadists” when discussing the September 11th attacks, fundamentally reshaping how American students learn about Islamic terrorism.
House Education and Workforce Committee Chairman Tim Walberg (R-MI) expressed alarm over these systematic efforts to influence K-12 curricula, calling CAIR’s educational partnerships “deeply troubling” in an exclusive statement to Jewish Onliner.
Unprecedented Digital Reach
The scope of this misinformation campaign proves staggering. Social media analysis by Jewish Onliner revealed that posts containing “400,000” and “Gaza” from June 3-October 12, 2025, achieved a potential reach of 460.5 million people. Additionally, according to AP News fact-checkers, individual posts claiming the fabricated Harvard study results received significant viral engagement, with one X post alone garnering over 35,700 shares and likes.
Gratitude for continuing to bring truth to a world full of lying islamist Nazi anti-civilizational deranged voids of morality
The way to handle the crap that went as information in this war was to believe nothing unless it came from Israeli sources like Amir Segal. Even the Jpost and Times of Israel went down the rabbit hole. The mainstream press here was a mouthpiece for Hamas about 2 minutes into the war.