Israeli military ground forces operating in the Gaza Strip November 2023 (Photo by IDF Spokesperson’s Unit)
For the second time since August, CAMERA prompts an Associated Press correction after the wire service falsely reported that the (Hamas-run) Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip has found most Palestinian fatalities in the Hamas-Israel war in the coastal terror are women and children.
The Aug. 11 correction, picked up by some 60 media outlets across North America, clarified:
This story was first published on Aug. 4, 2026. It was updated on Aug. 11, 2026, to correct how the proportion of women and children in the death toll in Gaza is characterized. They constitute roughly half of the dead, according to data from Gaza’s Health Ministry, not most of the dead. It was also updated to correct the dateline to DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip, not DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza City.
Yet, on Oct. 14 in English and Spanish, AP repeated the identical error, stating that the (Hamas-run) Health Ministry “doesn’t give a breakdown of civilians and militants, but says women and children make up most of the dead” (“Iran says a ship sank after striking a mine in Strait of Hormuz, and other Middle East developments”).
In response to communication from CAMERA, the news agency again corrected that same day. The updated text changed most to “almost half.” In addition, a clarification appended to the bottom of the article states: “This item has been corrected to show that almost half, not most, of the dead are women and children.”
AP’s Oct. 14 correction is less careful than the August correction as it adopts the terror organization’s faulty figures as fact. As CAMERA explained at JNS:
While the original correction rightly cited Gaza’s Health Ministry as the source of the “roughly half of the dead” fatality figure for women and children, this month’s correction (picked up by more than 100 media outlets globally) adopted the Hamas figure as fact.
Dropping the attribution to the Hamas source, the Oct. 15 clarification stated as fact: “This item has been corrected to show that almost half, not most, of the dead are women and children.”
“Anything in the AP news report that could reasonably be disputed should be attributed,” the news agency’s own “Telling the Story” principles advise.
Hamas’s casualty statistics for women and children could be reasonably disputed. Indeed, they are.
Thus, in “Questionable Counting: Analysing the Death Toll from the Hamas-Run Ministry of Health in Gaza,” Andrew Fox of the Henry Jackson Society noted that the ministry “overstates the number of women and children killed.”
Fox, a senior associate fellow at the society, cited, for example, “a 22-year-old registered as a 4-year-old, a 31-year-old registered as a 1-year-old and several men with male first names registered as female—artificially increasing the numbers of women and children reported killed. The lists also include people who died before the war and people who died from attacks by Hamas rather than the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).”
AP’s correction appeared in both English and Spanish and was reproduced in The Boston Herald, The Toronto Star, and New York Daily News, among more than 100 additional media outlets.