Gaza’s population grew last year. That’s according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry, the same source Israel’s critics have treated as the final word on the war.
An analysis of the ministry’s 2025 figures by the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), highlighted Wednesday by the Washington Free Beacon, found that Gaza’s population increased by 1.2 percent in 2025. The ministry recorded 50,227 births and 24,650 deaths. Only 5,780 of those deaths were classified as nonviolent.
To give a little perspective, in 2022 there were 6,061 deaths in Gaza, a number that was elevated by the COVID pandemic. So Gaza recorded fewer nonviolent deaths in the year of the UN-backed famine declaration than in a peacetime pandemic year.
AIJAC also tested the figures against the benchmark set by Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC). By the IPC’s standard, famine would have meant at least 8,600 indirect deaths during the period in question. Hamas’s own count for all of 2025 fell well short of that number.
A famine that kills fewer people than an ordinary year is an unusual kind of famine.
The gender breakdown is similarly awkward for critics. Men accounted for 18,085 of the 24,650 recorded deaths, or 73.4%. That’s hard to square with two years of claims that women and children made up 70% of the dead. The data don’t show how many of those men were combatants, but they do show who was dying, and it wasn’t mostly women and children.
AIJAC doesn’t vouch for the Hamas ministry’s numbers, and notes that the data are historically unreliable and often skewed. Its point is that claims contradicted even by Hamas’s own figures say a lot about the people making them.
For two years, Hamas’s figures were cited as evidence of genocide. If they’re reliable enough to indict Israel, they’re reliable enough for this: “Populations are not expected to grow rapidly during genocides,” AIJAC observed.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry amplified the findings while repeating that Hamas’s figures are “not a reliable source.”
Israel never trusted Hamas’s numbers. But its critics did. And now they have to decide whether they still do.
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