Lebanese Casualty Figures are not Reliable
Guest Post
The following is a guest post by a reader who prefers to remain anonymous. The subject of casualty figures from Israel’s many wars is important and it is particularly difficult to find information about it presented by those with a basic commitment to truth telling. See my earlier interview with Adar Weinreb. The high civilian casualty figures for the opening wave of airstrikes of the new war known as ‘Operation Eternal Darkness’ have generated yet more international condemnation, and it is widely believed that Israel was trying to crash the ceasefire by forcing Iran to resume hostilities in response to ‘terror bombing’ of Lebanese Shi’ites. Further contributions on the subject are welcome.
Contradictions in the Number of People Killed on the Days of April 7-9
Lebanese Ministry of Public Health (LMoPH, or LMoH, for short) numbers are generally accepted without question. However, a few of their recently announced figures cited by Lebanon’s National News Agency (NNA) are mutually irreconcilable.
This report states that as of the afternoon of April 10, 1,953 people had been killed during the war in total, and 65 people were killed that day. This report states that, as of that same afternoon, the death toll of the April 8 attack had risen to 357, and this one states that as of April 7, the death toll was 1,530. Taken together, these official sources mean that, during the remainder of April 7 and the days of April 8 and April 9, only 1 person was killed, outside of Israel’s “Eternal Darkness” strikes (1,953 minus 1,530 minus 357 minus 65 = 1). Needless to say, this is basically impossible, given the ongoing airstrikes throughout the country and military clashes in the south.1
Not only do these figures strain credulity, they contradict other figures provided. The NNA posted here that per the LMoH, as of the afternoon of April 9, 1,888 people had been killed in total during the war, and 303 had been killed in the “Eternal Darkness” strikes on April 8. As I already noted, their April 7 update stated that the death toll of the entire war was 1,530. Taken together, that means that the death toll on the end of April 7, after that update, and on April 8, outside of the “Eternal Darkness” strikes, and on April 9, until the update was 1,888 minus 1,530 minus 303 = 55. This shows that 55 people were killed during those days, not 1, as follows from their April 10th announcement.2 3
From the above, at the minimum, we see that the LMoH figures aren’t reliable, since they’re internally contradictory. More specifically, it appears that they’re trying to inflate the death toll of Israel’s “Eternal Darkness” strikes. They do this, first, by conflating all deaths from the war on April 8 with those specifically from the 10 minutes of strikes constituting the “Eternal Darkness” attack, and secondly, apparently, they do this by lumping in deaths from other days.
As I noted, if the April 9 announcement is to be believed, then 55 people were killed on late April 7, in other strikes on April 8, and on the beginning of April 9, whereas the April 10 announcement lumps 54 of them into the “Eternal Darkness” attack. If the April 10 announcement is to be believed, then 358 people were killed from the afternoon of April 7 through April 9. All but one of whom were killed during 10 minutes of April. Much more likely, assuming that stated totals are accurate, they lumped all casualties over those days into the toll of the Eternal Darkness attack.
Contradictions continue with their April 11th announcement. It states that 2,020 people were killed in total, including 97 killed that day. However, as I noted, their April 10 announcement stated that 1,953 people had been killed, so the total on April 11 would have needed to be at least 2,050 (1,953 + 97). If the April 11 cumulative and daily daily death tolls are accurate, perhaps they inflated the previous ones, as part of exaggerating the death toll of the April 8th attack.
Anomalously Low Number Reported Wounded on Days of April 7-9
Their figures imply that from the April 7 afternoon announcement through April 9, only 57 people were wounded outside of the “Eternal Darkness” attack,4 which is considerably lower than their recent average of about 152 per day.5
The simplest explanation for the reported sharp decline would be that most of the injuries during those days were falsely lumped into the figure for the “Eternal Darkness” attack.
Inexplicable Rise in Reported Women Killed
The next issue is an anomalous increase in reported women killed. On April 7, the LMoH reported that 102 women, 130 children, and 1,298 men had been killed. On April 11, they reported that 248 women, 165 children, and 1,607 men were killed. Thus, over the 4 day period, 490 were reported killed of whom 146 (248 minus 102) were reported to be women, 35 were reported to be children (165 minus 130), and 309 were reported to be men (1,607 minus 1,298). That comes out to 7% children, 30% women, and 63% men. It’s odd that the share of women is so high and that the share of men is so low.
Now, the obvious explanation is that the “Eternal Darkness” attack on April 8 was particularly indiscriminate. But if that were the case, we’d expect the children’s share killed to be higher. In fact, as the April 7 numbers show, the percent killed who were children before the April 8 attack was 8.5%. Thus, the reported share killed who were children actually dropped. Why would that be the result of particularly indiscriminate attacks?
The percentages look even stranger if we look at additional deaths announced in the following days. Their April 9 announcement stated that 303 people had been killed in the April 8 attack, including 71 women, 30 children, and 9 elderly people. If we assume that of the elderly people, 5 were female and 4 were male, we’d get 30 children, 76 women (71 + 5) and 197 men. Adding those to the April 7 numbers, we get 178 women, 160 children, and 1,495 men.
What were the demographic shares of those killed between then and April 11? Well, you had another 5 children (165 minus 160), another 70 women (248 minus 178) and another 112 males (1,607 minus 1,495) for a total of an additional 187 people. Of these 187, the percentage who are children is just 2.7%, the percentage who are women is a whopping 37%, and the percentage who are male is 60%.
To repeat, the period of April 8-11 had an oddly high share of casualties being women. Naturally, this might be explained by the indiscriminate attack on April 8, but when we remove the bulk of the deaths from the April 8 attack, we get an even higher female share of casualties!
The simplest explanation is that they falsely inflated the number of women killed.6 7
Change in LMoH Reporting System
Notably, the Lebanese Ministry of Health had been publishing daily casualty figures on their site, but they stopped posting on April 7, restarting on April 12 (posting their full casualty breakdown for April 11, but not for the earlier missed days). During their pause, the figures came from Lebanon’s National News Agency, citing the Health Emergency Operations Center of the Ministry of Public Health.
The contradictions I pointed out all stem from this period when the LMoH stopped posting on their site.
Perhaps these false figures only began to be introduced then, with the absence of daily tolls on the LMoH possibly meant to obscure this.
Ministry Context and History of Lying
The LMoH was already making extremely dubious claims about casualties during the last war. In defense of their reports at the time, the NYT, noted (among other things) that the head the ministry was nominated by Sunnis, not Hezbollah.
It’s worth noting, then, that the current minister, Rakan Nassereddine, was indeed nominated by Hezbollah. In the words of Hezbollah’s Al-Manar outlet, “Hezbollah is represented by two ministers: Minister of Public Health Rakan Nassereddine and Minister of Labor Mohammad Haidar.”
During the previous war, the LMoH would regularly claim that the vast majority, if not all, of the casualties were civilians,8 which was undermined by their own reported demographics of victims,9 and even more so by external evidence, such as the flood the funeral announcements on Hezbollah channels for their martyrs.10
They also seemed to systematically undercount huge numbers of militants killed. This became most evident at the end of the war,11 as Israel’s reported number of terrorists killed12 roughly equaled the total number of people the LMoH reported were killed in the country,13 and Hezbollah’s finally announced death toll of their fighters actually significantly exceeded it.14
It happens to be that that their own figures show 57 people having been injured by the war, during that time, as I’ll note later, making the implication that only 1 person was killed a bit more implausible.
They’ve typically maintained a ratio of wounded to killed of about 3:1, not 57:1 (their April 11 announcement shows a ratio of about 3.2).
There’s also an internal contradiction in their graphic released on April 9 (second slide here). The table labeled “Number and Percentage of Women and Men Casualties (greater than 18) Scattered by Status” lists 1668 men and 220 women killed. But those sum to 1,888, which was their listed total death toll for the war to that point, not just for those aged 18 and up. Perhaps this is just a careless error, and the table shouldn’t have said “greater than 18.”
Regarding their earlier claim of 303 people killed in the April 8 attack, and their later claim of 357, it’s interesting to note that on April 12, when they finally started updating the LMoH website with the first updates since April 7, their posted death toll for the entire day of April 8 was 303, not 357 (147 + 30 + 35 + 4 + 53 + 34 = 303).
To get the figure of 57 wounded over that time, they state that as of April 10, 6,303 people were wounded and that 211 people were wounded that day, while their April 7 update stated that 4,812 people had been wounded. And their April 10 announcement stated that the April 8 attack wounded 1,223 people. Subtraction (6,303 minus 211 minus 4,812 minus 1,223 = 57) shows 57 people wounded from the April 7 announcement through April 9, outside the “Eternal Darkness” attack.
While I haven’t referenced Israeli figures, thus far, showing how the LMoH figures are even internally irreconcilable, the surge in the reported share of female casualties similarly shows up as a contradiction to the Israeli estimates.
If one would accept both the Israeli and the Lebanese figures, one would consistently find that (assuming all terrorists were adult males, for simplicity) the number of male civilians killed exceeded the number of female civilians, by about a factor of 1.5. However, after the April 8 attack, when pairing Lebanese and Israeli reports, one finds that the civilian women killed now outnumber the civilian men.
And while that could be due to Israelis exaggerating the number of terrorists they killed, it’s hard to make the numbers work.
On April 9, Israel said that 1,400 terrorists had been killed. Even assuming that no more terrorists were killed through April 11, you’d get 207 civilian men killed (1,607 minus 1,400) vs. 248 women.
Even if Israeli attacks were indiscriminate, you wouldn’t expect them to be more likely to kill women than men, considering that civilian male casualties generally outnumber civilian female ones.
As a sanity check, an OSINT account using just LMoH reports and Hezb accounts estimated 1,002 fighters killed, 239 civilian men, 102 women, and 130 children, as of April 7. Another OSINT account that just tracks Hezb channels noted that Hezb death announcements increased considerably the week of March 29, then “literally skyrocketed” the week of April 5, with hundreds mourned.
So, if at least 1,000 were killed as of April 7, and hundreds were killed that week, mostly after April 8, when the “Eternal Darkness” attack occurred, then it’s quite reasonable that 1,400 would have been killed by April 11.
(For added context, the user who described the increase the week of March 29, described over 40 Hezb deaths being recorded per day. If the following week then ‘skyrocketed,’ it might have had something like 100 deaths a day, or 1,400 by April 11).
It’s also possible that they’re undercounting militants killed, further skewing the ratio. As I note later, during the last war with Israel, the LMoH seemed to omit thousands of militants from their count.
E.g. in October 2024, they reported 1,974 people killed, including 127 children and 261 women, implying 1,586 adult males.
If only 20% were militants, that would be a total of 395 people. Assuming all militants are adult males, you would have had 1,191 civilian males killed, compared to 261 women – a factor of about 4.6, which is fairly implausible. Given that in reality, some children (and probably women) were militants, based on Hezb’s own martyr posters, the ratio of civilian men to civilian women killed would have been even higher.
It’s true that in other conflicts, more civilian men than women are killed (maybe they’re more likely to be mistaken for militants, maybe they’re more reckless, etc.) but I think that you only get such sharp sex disparities in conflicts where one side carries out systematic massacres of men.
Civilians killed in Ukraine, for example, show a much more even distribution by sex, in spite of Russia carrying out massacres mostly of men, such as the Bucha Massacre.
Per this report, after 4 years of the war in Ukraine, of 12,539 adult civilians killed of known sex, the ratio of male to female was – 1.63 (7,777 / 4,762).
For the ratio in Lebanon to have been as low as that in Ukraine, you’d need at least 1,160 of the men killed to have been militants (even assuming all militants are adult males, which isn’t the case here), which would make a majority of the casualties militants.
This article from July 2024 found the significant majority of casualties to have been members of Hezbollah.
This OSINT account counted 1,734 Hezbollah militants killed as of November 26, 2024, whereas per Lebanon, the total death toll at that point was 3,823.
The OSINT count was much lower than the actual Hezbollah death toll, as the account acknowledged being swamped with funeral notices, so only recording 18 per day, down from a previous cap of 27 per day.
With that vast undercount still accounting for 45% of Lebanon’s total reported deaths, it’s clear that a significant majority of those killed were militants.
This was also evident earlier in the war. For example, an OSINT account’s daily count of Hezbollah funeral notices was close to the LMoH’s reported daily death tolls, in spite of the former not including all Hezbollah militants, and not including anyone else.
For example from November 1 to November 8, his count increased by 180, while the LmoH’s reported total for the whole country increased by 221 (see here and here).
Deck chairs on the Titanic. Big picture the world sees is Israel is killing civilians again.
Babies crawl.
Birds fly.
Fish swim.
Arab nationalists lie.