Some 60 media outlets across North America have published a CAMERA-prompted Associated Press correction of an article which overstated Hamas’ own figures for the percentage of Gaza Strip fatalities who are women and children.
The Aug. 4 article, “Netanyahu says no Israeli withdrawal from Gaza until Hamas has been completely disarmed,” by AP’s Wafaa Shurafa, Samy Magdy, Ibrahim Hazboun and Melanie Lidman, had erred in both English and Spanish, stating that Hamas’ Health Ministry “does not give a breakdown of civilians and militants but says women and children make up most of the dead.” (Emphasis added.)
Logo of the Palestinian Ministry of Health (Wikipedia CC BY-SA 4.0)
In fact, as open-source intelligence indicates, Hamas’ Ministry of Health began reporting in July 2025 that the majority of fatalities are men — not women and children. In addition, on July 2, 2026 (1000 days since the war started), the Hamas media office reported that out of 73,066 people killed during the war, 21,500 were children and 12,500 were women. Thus, Hamas’ MoH and its GMO agree that the total of children and women (34,000) is less than half of all those killed.
Notably, last month, CAMERA prompted The Washington Post to correct the identical error in two articles.
In response to communication from CAMERA, the AP amended its report on Aug. 11 to more accurately state that Hamas’ Ministry of Health “does not give a breakdown of civilians and militants but says women and children constitute roughly half of the dead” (emphasis added).
In addition, a note appended to the bottom of the article commendably alerts readers to the change. It states:
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.
Secondary media outlets which published AP’s correction include The Washington Post, The Seattle Times, Dallas Morning News, Winnipeg Free Press, local stations across the United States affiliated with NBC, CBS and ABC, and many others. As of this writing, editors have yet to correct the Spanish article.
Screenshot from AP’s Aug. 5, 2026 video which alleged as fact that more than 300 people were killed on Nov. 22, 2023, “when warplanes flattened a residential block in Gaza City’s Sabra neighborhood.”
Separately, AP editors failed to respond to questions about the veracity of the article’s statement that more than 300 were killed in an Israeli attack on the Sabra neighborhood in Gaza City on Nov. 22, 2023. Without qualification or even attribution, the article states as fact:
Earlier on Tuesday, Palestinians gathered for a mass funeral of more than 100 bodies finally recovered from a deadly Israeli strike in Gaza in 2023. More than 300 people were killed on Nov. 22, 2023, weeks into the war with Hamas, when warplanes flattened a residential block in Gaza City’s Sabra neighborhood.
Around 40 bodies were recovered soon afterward in a frantic scramble of rough tools and bare hands, but most were buried deep beneath the rubble. Reports of the high number of victims in one of the war’s deadliest attacks took days to reach the public in the chaos just before its first ceasefire.
CAMERA’s searches did not produce any credible sources from the time alleging that an Israeli strike “flattened” a residential block in the Sabra neighborhood on Nov. 22, 2023. AP’s own coverage from November 2023 also didn’t mention it. The United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs’ report on events of that day also didn’t note any devastating strike with hundreds of dead in Sabra.
At the time, the Houthi-run Yemen News agency reported about that day: “In the Sabra area, enemy forces bombed three houses, including two for Abu Sharia family, and a third for Nims family, which led to the killing of a number of citizens and the wounding of others.” Three houses are a far cry from a residential block, and a “number” of citizens is a great distance from “more than 300.” The anti-Israel Mondoweiss site reported at the time that six houses were destroyed and 15 people were killed.
How does the purported erasure of a whole residential block and the killing of hundreds of people go under the radar in such an intensively covered conflict? How is that logical?
Furthermore, CNN reported on Aug. 5, 2026: “Nearly every person killed in that November 2023 attack hailed from two large Palestinian families, one of which is tied to the Mujahedeen Brigades, a Palestinian militant group.” There is no mention in AP’s story this week about this terror connection.
Hamas official Mahmoud Basal, a spokesman for Hamas’ civil defense, is one of the sources pushing the claim that hundreds were killed in a strike in that neighborhood on Nov. 22, 2023. Basal, who holds the rank in Hamas of major (Ra’ed) was a key figure promoting the Al-Ahli hospital libel, blaming deaths from an errant Palestinian Islamic Jihad strike on Israel.
But now on the November 2023 Sabra “massacre,” AP isn’t even bothering with he said/she said, and is going all the way with Hamas’ unverified and dubious claim. Editors declined to make clear in both the article and related videos that the claim that “more than 300 people were killed” in a strike which allegedly destroyed a residential block is unverified.
For the Hebrew version of this post, please see CAMERA Hebrew.