A Bungled Effort

Andrew Fox's Attempted Whitewash of the Gaza Genocide

A new report by Andrew Fox—a Research Fellow at the Henry Jackson Society billed as a specialist in the Middle East and Disinformation—attempts to cast doubt upon estimates of Gazan fatalities published by the Gaza Ministry of Health (MoH), alleging that the MoH inflates the number of civilian casualties.¹

The report has had a considerable impact on public discourse. Western politicians such as US Congressman Ritchie Torres, journalists such as the Sunday Telegraph columnist Zoe Strimpel and Christopher Buhl of Bild, and the Israeli Foreign Ministry claim the study discredited the MoH data. Yet, as analyses by the economist Mike Spagat and researcher Gabriel Epstein and the Israeli-American researcher Adar Weinrib prove, Fox’s report is drenched in errors and disinformation.

This analysis will highlight more of Fox’s falsehoods, while more generally focusing on his methods as a researcher. I conclude that Fox is either guilty of academic fraud or, at best, rendered incompetent as a researcher by his ignorance of the subject matter and statistics more generally.

Lack of Transparency & Reliance on Secret Sources

Fox’s report heavily relies on secret data: Israeli-government data that Israel does not publicly disclose. Throughout the report, for example, he uses the Gaza Population Register maintained by Israel in an attempt to discredit MoH data (see, for example, page 9 of the report).

However, the Population Register is not publicly available. If Fox got special access to it from the Israeli government, he should explain how he did this and make the Register public for use by other researchers. He should also make clear not just where the Register and MoH data are allegedly in conflict, but if the Register corroborates other aspects of the Gaza Ministry of Health fatalities data, such as the ages, genders, and ID numbers of persons listed as killed.

Similarly, Fox attaches considerable weight to a supposed Israeli list of 10,000 combatants eliminated in the Gaza Strip (p. 29). Does Fox have access to this list? If so, he should make it public, so researchers can determine whether Israel is counting civilians as combatants.

Israeli Estimates as Articles of Faith

Throughout his report, Fox never offers a morsel of criticism for Israel’s estimates of casualties in Gaza. Indeed, he uncritically credits Israel’s claim to have killed 17,000 to 20,000 combatants in Gaza (p. 29).

This credulous approach is problematic. For one, researchers into wartime fatalities should not serve as stenographers or typists for belligerent states. In addition, there is no publicly available evidence to support the Israeli estimates. In contrast to the MoH—which has offered names, ages, and Israel-issued ID numbers for over 40,000 Gazan fatalities; has acknowledged and corrected errors when it made them; and has even contradicted demographic estimates coming from Hamas’ Government Media Office²—Israel offers zero data or transparency.

Fox should have mentioned the months of reporting showing that the IDF shoots unarmed Gazan civilians in “kill zones” and then counts them as combatants. He would have done well to cite my own demographics-based analysis of Gazan fatalities, which discredits various IDF estimates.

Lazy Research

Many problems with Fox’s report come down to his casual and sluggish research method.

One example is Fox’s use of an outdated database released by the MoH in September (henceforth, the “September List”) which covered fatalities only through August 2024 and contains 34,344 identified fatalities.³

Another issue of effort or comprehensiveness comes in Fox’s erroneous argument that natural, non-war-related deaths have been systematically included in the MoH’s casualty count. Had Fox actually read the natural-deaths data of the Palestinian Bureau of Central Statistics—a source which, remarkably, he cites (p. 20)—he would understand that his argument is bunk. For example, the non-COVID-related natural deaths of Gazans over 65 in 2021 exceeded the total number of elderly⁴ fatalities reported by the MoH through the first year of the war, proving that natural deaths are not being systematically counted.

Ignorance

Fox is ignorant about demographic patterns of wartime casualties. He uses his (and his readers’) ignorance to conclude that the over-representation of adult men among the dead in Gaza is “concrete evidence that neither [women or children] have been targeted” (p.19).

The first problem is that Fox wrongly counts the demographics within his cited source. Hence his false statement (p. 5) that males 15-45 constitute a majority of all fatalities in Gaza. The actual figure from the September MoH List he cites is only 38%—13,036 out of a total of 34,344.

More foundational is Fox’s ignorance of military history; he doesn’t understand that men are virtually always heavily over-represented among violent wartime fatalities, including in wars conducted by militaries and militias that deliberately kill civilians.

Let’s look at a couple contemporary examples. In the Syrian Civil War. 82.5% (166,241/201,290), of civilians killed by Assad’s military and Iranian militias such as Hezbollah were adult men.

Similarly, throughout Hamas’s October 7th massacre, adult men constituted 60% of civilian deaths.

In his ignorance, Fox does not realize how unusual and damning the demographics of violent fatalities in Gaza are. Fewer than 50% of Gazan fatalities are adult men, and of these, many are elderly or middle-aged.

Gotchas

Because he was unable to identify systematic and demographically significant errors in the MoH data, Fox focuses on hunting for “gotchas,” or anecdotal mistakes among the tens of thousands of MoH fatalities. These gotchas have no relevance to the larger demographic picture.

For example, Fox uses the Gaza Population Register to claim a single 31-year-old man on the MoH fatalities list was misidentified as an infant (p. 9). Even assuming this is true (again, the Register is a private Israeli government source researchers do not have access to), it is statistically irrelevant.

Another case of mistaken age cited by Fox, a 22-year-old falsely classified as a young child, was already independently acknowledged by the MoH to be an error. Specifically, the MoH corrected this mistake in the fatalities list it released in September, three months before Fox’s report was released.

Correcting one’s mistakes is not the mark of a discreditable source, but a reliable one. And it is a practice with which Fox should acquaint himself.

Fox’s Distortion of MoH Gender Data: A Lie by Omission?

Fox accuses the MoH of deliberately rigging its gender demographics to inflate the number of female fatalities (p. 9). Fox claims to have identified 103 male fatalities mislabelled as females by the MoH. This amounts to a miniscule 0.8% (103/12,370) of total female fatalities which are allegedly mislabelled; but even that tiny figure is misleading, as the MoH’s data also included females mislabelled as males, which would offset any inflation in female fatalities.

See the following women misidentified as military-aged men:

If the MoH were deliberately rigging the data to increase female fatalities then why would these errors go in both directions?

Fox’s failure to mention that females were mislabelled as males deserves scrutiny. Did Fox simply not look for this information out of a debilitating confirmation bias? Or, less charitably, did he lie by omission to strengthen his argument of MoH malice and demographic distortion?

Statistical Illiteracy and Sampling Bias

Fox interprets demographic disparities in the sources that the MoH relies upon to pronounce deaths as proof of their foul play. He specifically mentions how deaths reported through family notification are considerably more likely to be men than deaths confirmed at hospitals (p. 17).

Fox doesn’t understand the basic statistical concept of “sampling bias,” where the manner in which data are collected can lead to the overrepresentation of certain demographics.

One of many possible explanations for the overrepresentation of men in Gaza’s family-reported fatalities is that widows have an incentive to report the deaths of their husbands as quickly as possible, so as to secure their inheritance and that of their children.⁵

Conclusions:

The most charitable interpretation of Fox’s Report is that it is a travesty, born of confirmation bias and ignorance. I am more inclined⁶ to accuse Fox of outright academic fraud: of stacking the deck in his favour through lies of omission, sophistry, and other dishonest methods.

The inference of dishonesty is supported by Fox’s tireless role as a propagator of fake news on social media. For example, Fox once falsely claimed that the corpse of a child decapitated in an Israeli air raid—a one-year-old named Ahmad Al-Najjar—was a “doll” and “shit attempt at faking an atrocity.”

That Fox’s report would attract praise from so many Israeli officials, Western politicians, and journalists is an obscenity.

Note of Edits

I edited this piece post-publication, correcting a few typographical errors, including the claim that the the non-COVID-related natural deaths of Gazans over 75 in 2021 exceeded the total number of elderly fatalities reported by the MoH. (I had meant to write 65.)

I also reiterated that I was faulting Fox for arguing that natural deaths were systematically included (rather than faulting him for arguing that some natural deaths were erroneously included). I had already made this point in the first draft, but made it more clearly in this edit (hence the word “systematically” now appears twice instead of once).

1. The MoH does not provide estimates of civilian vs combatant fatalities; but rather reports on violent fatalities in general (both civilian and combatant). Fox however alleges they inflate the civilian count by implication, by inflating the number of women and children killed.

2. Specifically, the MoH has disputed the contention of Hamas’ “Government Media Office” that 70% of Gazan fatalities are women and children (or, in another formulation, women, children, and elderly). For a time, the Ministry of Health repeated these erroneous claims. However, in a public interview with Sky News, it repudiated them.

3. Fox should have used the latest data set released by the MoH in October, which covered fatalities through 7 October 2024 and identified 40,717 deaths.

4. Defined as 65 or over.

5. Ben van der Merwe, a journalist for Sky News, pointed this possibility out to me.

6. I cannot prove this definitively, to be sure. A reader more charitable to Fox than I am might explain his bunk report as the product of incompetence and confirmation bias rather than outright academic fraud.