In March 2024, nine-year-old Fouad Hazem Fouad Hamada was killed alongside his father and three sisters when an Israeli In March 2024, an Israeli airstrike on the home of nine-year-old Fouad Hazem Fouad in Khan Younis, killed the child, as well as his father and three sisters.
In December 2023, an Israeli drone shot ten-year-old Sara Khalil Harb Qadieh was in the head near a school where she was sheltering in Southern Gaza.
And in October 2023, sixteen-year-old Aya Muhammad Abu Shawish and her family were buried in the rubble of their home in the Nusierat refugee camp.
These children were initially added to the Gaza Ministry of Health’s official list of wartime fatalities. However, between August 2024 and March 2025, each of them was removed from the list. And they were not alone. In this timespan, over 3,000 names were removed from the GHM list, including over 1,000 children.
These deletions provoked controversy. Defenders of Israel such as Salo Aizenberg cited the removals as proof that the deaths of these children were fabricated, and that the GHM list as a whole was unreliable.
AOAV’s investigation shows otherwise. Based on open sources, we assess that the overwhelming majority of the 1,079 child fatalities removed by the GHM between August 2024 and March 2025 were in fact real deaths.
What We Found
Using open sources, we confirmed the deaths of 61% of the removed 1,079 children. 219 more of the children (20%) probably were killed, although we could not verify their deaths.
Conversely, we could only confirm that 3% of the children, or 33 in total, were erroneously labeled as having been killed. For the remaining 16%, or 172 children, we could not find evidence either that they had been killed or that they were still alive.
Researchers are invited to consult our strict and conservative methodology, as well as our raw data sets, to assess our findings.
Why did the GHM remove so many children who had been killed?
The answer lies in the high—and highly formal—evidentiary standards of the GHM. For a death to be verified and appear on its list, either 1) a GHM employee must have seen the body of a deceased, or 2) a judicial ruling must confirm the death.
Initially, the GHM also appears to have included on its lists any deaths reported by families through its online form. It is possible that they found errors in this method and thus opted to adopt more conservative standards. (We ourselves confirmed that 3% of the removed children were erroneously labelled as having been killed.)
Ironically, and contrary to the critics of the GHM who claim its death toll is inflated, this episode attests to the scrupulosity of its methods, its conservativism, and indeed its tendency to undercount fatalities. Indeed, the arguments of GHM critics are logically incoherent. Why would the GHM lower the death toll if it were committed to inflating it?
A question of counting: Gaza’s fatality figures and the exaggerated counter-claims of Salo Aizenberg and Andrew Fox
The removals and the media reaction to them not only confirm the scrupulosity of the GHM’s methods, but also unravel the intense biases of commentators who seek to discredit the GHM and diminish the scale of death and suffering in Gaza.
Salo Aizenberg, who has made a name for himself tracking Palestinian fatality claims, alleged that these deaths were invented. Meanwhile, Major (ret’d) Andrew Fox – a researcher with the Henry Jackson Society, who has been to Gaza as a guest of the Israeli Defence Forces – went further, claiming that the Ministry had “been accepting names onto that list with no evidence whatsoever.”
Their accusations were uncritically picked up by outlets including the Telegraph, the New York Post, and Fox News, gaining swift traction in a media landscape without much in the way of critical analysis by the journalists who covered the story.
This sad saga reminds us of the value of independent research and field work, as opposed to breathlessly and on shoddy evidence accusing the GHM of fabricating its death toll, with the apparent motive of exonerating the IDF.
AOAV asked Fox and Aizenberg to clarify their methodological basis in dismissing the deleted figures as deletions born from malice. They did not respond to our requests for comment.
Natural Deaths?
The child fatalities we studied discredit another claim of Aizenberg and Andrew Fox: that the GHM systematically includes natural and indirect deaths in its death toll. For, if indirect or “natural” child deaths were systematically included – as Andrew Fox, Aizenberg, and other Israel supporters have repeatedly alleged without evidence – we would expect to see (at least) scores of natural deaths among these 1,079 children . Yet we only identified 12 cases as indirect deaths, versus 385 violent deaths:
Conclusion
When the GHM removed 3,000 names from its list of fatalities — including 1,079 children —this provoked intense scrutiny. Critics such as Fox and Aizenberg called it evidence of deliberate falsification and inflation by the GHM.
And yet our analysis of the evidence points to the exact opposite: the conservatism, scrupulosity, standardization and intellectual seriousness of the GHM’s counting process. The GHM insists on a high standard of evidence—a body seen by an official, or the formal finding of death by a judicial authority—before counting a death. Should a death be counted by some other means, it is liable to be removed by the GHM, even if it is a real death.
As the world looks on at the devastating human toll of this conflict, it is crucial that future statements about Gaza’s fatalities are approached with rigour and critical analysis, approaches missing from the likes of Salo Aizenberg and Andrew Fox. Their claims that the MoH published over 1,000 falsified child deaths appear to rest on partial data, selective interpretations, and a willingness to jump to conclusions rather than undertake thorough, transparent investigations.
As this investigation has shown, most of the so-called ‘fake child deaths’ mocked by Aizenberg are tragically real. The removals from the Ministry of Health’s lists are more likely the result of procedural caution than evidence of manipulation.
Matthew Ghobrial Cockerill is a PhD student at the London School of Economics (LSE)
This investigation was made possible by the tireless work of researchers in Gaza – Wafaa, Hazem, Baher, and Asia – who laboured under unthinkable conditions. The responsibility for this final assessment rests with AOAV, but the credit for the substance of this report is theirs.
Editor’s note: After submission, this article underwent further editorial revision and was published. The author subsequently requested changes, and an updated version was duly published. The article presented here are the author’s own words, without revision.
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