NEW YORK – In his latest attack on Israel, Tucker Carlson is amplifying propaganda directly from the Hamas terror organization, falsely claiming that Israel has killed “mostly women and children” in Gaza. This assertion, made in a video released on February 5, 2026, alongside Anglican Archbishop Hosam Naoum, is a deliberate distortion of reality, relying on casualty figures from a source that is notoriously unreliable and has a vested interest in manipulating the facts.
Carlson’s claim is part of a recurring narrative he promotes, alleging that Israel intentionally targets civilians. The primary source for this narrative is the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza, an entity widely recognized as untrustworthy. The ministry’s reporting is deeply flawed; it classifies all deaths as “civilians,” routinely mislabels adult males as women or children, includes deaths caused by Hamas’s own misfired rockets, and even folds natural deaths into its wartime totals. Throughout the conflict, the ministry has been caught repeatedly altering, deleting, and reclassifying its own data to fit a political agenda.
Even if one were to entertain Hamas’s dubious figures, Carlson’s conclusion collapses under basic scrutiny. In October 2025, former President Donald Trump stated that Hamas had lost approximately 58,000 fighters. This number accounts for roughly 81% of the total death toll reported by Hamas at the time. Even if one were to make the absurd assumption that every single remaining casualty was a woman or a child, the number would be far too low to support the claim that Israel is deliberately targeting civilians.
Based on these figures, Israel’s civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio is approximately 0.24-to-1. This is an unprecedentedly low ratio in the history of urban warfare. For comparison, the United Nations estimates the global average for such conflicts to be 9 civilians killed for every 1 combatant (a 9-to-1 ratio). Israel’s precision in minimizing civilian harm is not a sign of indiscriminate killing, but of a military exercising remarkable restraint under difficult conditions.
Further evidence undermining Carlson’s claims comes from Hamas itself. A February 2026 report from the terror group pledged stipends to 50,000 “widows of Gazan casualties,” implicitly acknowledging that at least 50,000 of the dead were male combatants. Moreover, Hamas’s casualty figures conveniently ignore the approximately 13,500 Gazans who would have died from natural causes during the course of the war, based on pre-war mortality data.
The very definition of a “child” casualty is also manipulated by Hamas. The terror group openly recruits and deploys teenagers aged 15 to 18 in combat roles. When these combatants are killed, they are cynically reported as “children” to inflate the numbers and generate international outrage. Data from the World Health Organization (WHO) further debunks the idea that children were systematically targeted. In February 2025, the WHO reported that over 100,000 children under two had been vaccinated against polio in Gaza—a number that is 150,000 more than the total number of children in that age group who were believed to exist in Gaza before the war, exposing the unreliability of demographic data used by Israel’s critics.
Carlson also ignores Hamas’s own culpability for Gazan deaths. Approximately 20% of the rockets Hamas fires at Israeli civilians fall short, landing inside Gaza and killing the very people Hamas claims to be protecting. The terror group has also been documented looting humanitarian aid and using violence against its own people.
Israel’s military conduct directly contradicts the narrative of intentional civilian killing. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) relies on snipers, armed drones, and precision-guided munitions to target specific terrorist operatives. These are not the methods of an army engaged in indiscriminate slaughter. Furthermore, the IDF employs extensive warning measures—including phone calls, text messages, leaflet drops, and “roof knocking” with non-lethal munitions—to urge civilians to evacuate targeted areas. These measures hinder battlefield efficiency and would be entirely irrational if the goal were to maximize civilian casualties.
Carlson is not an unwitting dupe; he is an active participant in Hamas’s propaganda war. As former U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee noted, it is fair to question the financial incentives behind Carlson’s narrative. “I cannot say [whether] Tucker Carlson is taking money from a foreign government… or that he’s getting money from people who may not represent a foreign government but who are sympathetic to a foreign government, and they become sponsors of his show and investors in his enterprise,” Huckabee stated.
By knowingly recycling enemy propaganda, Tucker Carlson is deceiving millions of Americans. He is pushing an Islamist narrative designed to make terrorists look like victims and turn Israel into a villain. This is a betrayal of American values and a dangerous legitimization of terror.
