Gaza MoH’s redaction of thousands of deaths fuelled doubt, but the data suggests something darker than deception.
In March 2024, nine-year-old Fouad Hazem Fouad Hamada was killed alongside his father and three sisters when an Israeli airstrike destroyed their home in Khan Younis.
In December 2023, ten-year-old Sara Khalil Harb Qadieh was shot in the head by an Israeli drone while sheltering in a school-turned-refuge in southern Gaza.
And in October 2023, sixteen-year-old Aya Muhammad Abu Shawish was buried with her family in the rubble of their home in the Nuseirat refugee camp.
These children are not mere numbers. Their deaths have been verified through eyewitness testimony and visual evidence, and their names appeared – at least at first – on the Gaza Ministry of Health’s official lists of wartime fatalities. But between August 2024 and March 2025, these three names vanished. They disappeared as if their short lives had never been.
And they were among more than 3,000 casualties quietly removed from the Ministry’s public records, some 1,079 of them being (at least initially reported) children.
The deletion ignited controversy. Critics accused the Ministry of deception.
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