Times of Israel (“UN cuts by more than half the number of women, children ‘identified’ as killed in Gaza“):
In a dramatic development, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has sharply revised downward the number of “identified” female and child fatalities in the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
The data now differentiates between the total number of deaths reported by Hamas (over 34,000) and the number of “identified” fatalities (over 24,000).
The new figures reported by OCHA reduce by more than half the number of women and children that it previously said had been killed during the war, though other “unregistered” deaths may be pending.
“Unregistered” deaths refers not to unidentified bodies held by hospitals, but mostly to more vague figures reported by Hamas as coming from “reliable media sources.”
All numbers continue to be based on reporting from the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry, and not on independent data.
Having previously reported that 9,500 women and 14,500 children had died during the war (some 69% of all fatalities), OCHA is now reporting far lower numbers, stating that among “identified” deaths, 4,959 women have died, along with 7,797 children (or 52% of the total number of identified deaths in the war).
Of note, the Hamas ministry counts all those under the age of 18 as children, while commentators note that a not-insignificant number of combatants are in their teens.
[…]
Until May 6, OCHA was citing only the over-34,000 death toll, and the far higher figures for women and children fatalities which were reported by the Hamas-controlled Government Media Office (GMO) organization in Gaza.
According to those figures, the total death toll was 34,735, of whom 9,500, or 27%, were women and over 14,500, or 42%, were children.
But on May 8, the agency adopted new figures. While it still kept the higher “reported” death toll (now at 34,844), it said “identified” fatalities stood at 24,686, of whom 4,959 (20%) were women and 7,797 (32%) were children.
Those revised figures constitute a 52% reduction in the reported number of women killed and a 53% reduction in the reported number of children killed during the war.
What accounts for these drastic changes?
As noted in a study published in Fathom Journal in March by academics Dr. Tom Simpson, Prof. Lewi Stone, and Prof. Gregory Rose, on December 11, the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry began differentiating between two different categories in its fatality data: “identified” deaths and “unregistered” deaths.
Simpson is a generalist economist with a PhD from the University of Western Australia, Stone is a biomathematician at Tel Aviv University and RMIT University in Melbourne, and Rose is an expert in international law at the University of Wollongong.
Speaking to The Times of Israel, Lewi and Rose explained that the “identified” deaths were those fatalities registered in Gaza hospitals, while the “unregistered” deaths were reports of fatalities supposedly collected from “reliable media sources,” according to the Gazan Ministry of Health.
But those “unregistered” figures appear to have been anything but reliable.
Ari Blaff of the right-leaning National Post (“United Nations halves estimate of women and children killed in Gaza“) adds:
David Adesnik, director of research at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), told the National Post he suspects the discrepancy stems from the UN’s decision to quietly stop using figures provided by the Hamas-run Government Media Office (GMO).
“So you see May 6 and before, the GMO (is listed as a source); all of a sudden, May 8, they don’t cite a source,” Adesnik told the Post over the phone on Sunday. He pointed to the similarity between the new figures and those from a May 2 Gaza Health Ministry (GMH) report as a tip-off suggesting the UN had ditched the media office’s figures in favour of those from the health ministry, “even though they don’t say (the Gaza) Health Ministry in the thing.”
“So clearly here we’ve done a switch from GMO’s big number, which never had any clear basis elaborated; like they just offered nothing but their own assertion. Whereas the Health Ministry does more to back its stuff up,” he said.
The differences between the two datasets was investigated by Gabriel Epstein of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, an American think-tank, who found in late March they yielded “wildly different and irreconcilable results, indicating that the media reports methodology is dramatically understating fatalities among adult males, the demographic most likely to be combatants.”
Epstein argued that his analysis of the two Hamas-run institutions “undercuts the persistent claim that 72 per cent of those killed in Gaza are women and children.”
Hillel Neuer, the executive director of UN Watch, an organization that monitors the body’s constellation of agencies, told the Post that the UN’s approach to monitoring Israel and Gaza is unique.
“The UN’s method of reporting deaths in Gaza is the complete opposite of what they do in other conflict situations,” Neuer said, pointing to the UN’s recent efforts in Ukraine where it has established “a defined methodology using individual records of civilian harm, where a standard of proof was met, namely, reasonable grounds to believe that the harm took place.”
Neuer suggested the divergent approach is due to institutional anti-Israel bias plaguing the international community.
“But when Israel can be blamed, it’s the complete opposite. For reporting Gaza deaths, there is no method, and no standard of proof. All the UN does is parrot figures supplied by Hamas, which is laundered and legitimized by the UN as the neutral-sounding ‘Gaza Ministry of Health,’ or ‘Government Media Office,’ when in fact both are run by the Hamas terrorist organization.”
Neuer called the significant update, which was not announced, as an admission “essentially … to have been feeding the media and the world completely false numbers.” The UN Watch leader encouraged the body to take a page out of its own playbook used during the Syrian Civil War, “when the UN Human Rights Office announced it had stopped updating the death toll … because it could no longer verify the sources of information, acknowledging its inability to verify ‘source material’ from others.”
I struggled to find a nonideological take on this. I thought I had done so when I found a Council on Foreign Relations report but, alas, it was just a blog post by Elliot Abrams (“UN Halves Its Estimate of Women and Children Killed in Gaza”). His take is predictable:
It has become increasingly clear that these numbers represent Hamas propaganda. The best analysis was done by Prof. Abraham Wyner of the Wharton School at Penn, in an article in Tablet Magazine. He demonstrates conclusively that “The numbers are not real. That much is obvious to anyone who understands how naturally occurring numbers work. The casualties are not overwhelmingly women and children….”
[…]
The Hamas figures are not credible, and if OCHA has finally recognized this it is a positive step. But it ought to be acknowledged openly, not slipped into a longer report. OCHA is still using Hamas figures (ie, those of the Gaza Ministry of Health) in giving total numbers for those killed, and should reflect on whether those numbers are any more reliable when they emerge from the same source: Hamas.
It is obvious that this war is a calamity for Gaza civilians and that thousands are dead and more are wounded. Hamas planned the war this way, placing its military resources in homes, schools, mosques, and hospitals and thus ensuring that once it started a war civilians would suffer greatly. Its gigantic tunnel network is meant to protect its fighters, not one single civilian. And civilian suffering, including homelessness, is very great.
Hamas wants the world to believe that the main casualties and fatalities have been women and children, an argument almost universally accepted until very recently. Now even the UN, or one part of the UN, silently acknowledges that it blindly accepted Hamas numbers meant to mislead. Others who accepted the Hamas propaganda should do likewise, and all have an obligation to come clean—not least the media in the United States and elsewhere.
While I’m not seeing coverage of this in the major American press, I’m seeing different takes in the foreign press.
Reuters (“UN says Gaza death toll still over 35,000 but not all bodies identified“):
The death toll in the Gaza Strip from the Israel-Hamas war is still more than 35,000, but the enclave’s Ministry of Health has updated its breakdown of the fatalities, the United Nations said on Monday after Israel questioned a sudden change in numbers.
U.N. spokesperson Farhan Haq said the ministry’s figures – cited regularly by the U.N. its reporting on the seven-month-long conflict – now reflected a breakdown of the 24,686 deaths of “people who have been fully identified.”
“There’s about another 10,000 plus bodies who still have to be fully identified, and so then the details of those – which of those are children, which of those are women – that will be re-established once the full identification process is complete,” Haq told reporters in New York.
[…]
Haq said U.N. teams in Gaza were not able to independently verify the Gaza Ministry of Health (MoH) figures given the ongoing war and sheer number of fatalities.
“Unfortunately we have the sad experience of coordinating with the Ministry of Health on casualty figures every few years for large mass casualty incidents in Gaza, and in past times their figures have proven to be generally accurate,” Haq said.
The World Health Organization “has a long-standing cooperation with the MoH in Gaza and we can attest that MoH has good capacity in data collection/analysis and its previous reporting has been considered credible,” said WHO spokesperson Margaret Harris.
“Real numbers could be even higher,” she said.
Presumably, this came after the initial hubbub over the new figures.
Although I study defense policy and conflict for a living, I claim no expertise in battle damage or casualty assessment. As a general rule, I distrust casualty estimates in ongoing conflicts given that 1) it’s damned near impossible to get accurate counts of deaths and injuries to other than one’s own military personnel while bullets are still flying and 2) there are strong incentives to present numbers favorable to one’s own position.
Getting accurate counts of civilian dead even after the fact is difficult. I’m not sure we have reliable information on the tolls of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan yet; we may never have it, especially for the latter, given Taliban control. And it’s simply much harder in a conflict where one side is a terrorist organization rather than a state military. By their very nature, Hamas tries to blend in with the civilian population.
The situation is confounded in the Middle East, as there seem to be no legitimately neutral experts. I’ve been around international relations scholars for thirty-odd years now and have never heard a presentation by Middle East scholars that wasn’t heated and emotional. Middle East studies is just a whole different thing than the rest of the profession, as everyone—even scholars who have spent their entire lives aside from research trips and the like in the West—seems to “go native.” They go beyond simply taking sides in the region’s disputes but seem to take on the animosities as well.
It seems obvious to me that, since at least the first Intifada, the UN General Assembly has been overwhelmingly on the Palestinian side in the conflict. But I don’t think the organization is intentionally cooking the books here. They’re relying on Hamas figures because Hamas is the de facto government of Gaza and the only source of data. Further, there seems to be a consensus among the folks who track these data for a living that they have been reasonably honest over the years.
The bottom line is that I don’t have the foggiest notion of how many have died in this conflict or what percentage of them are noncombatants. If we’re to believe that 24,686 bodies have been positively identified and that 52 percent of those are women and children, that’s still a horrific toll. And we surely can’t assume that every single male over 19 killed was a Hamas fighter.
