The UN has denied that the estimated death toll of women and children in the war in Gaza has been revised downward, pointing towards a confusion between the total numbers of dead bodies recorded, and the number of those who have so far been fully identified.
After the Gaza health ministry’s revised totals of those killed first appeared on the website of the UN’s office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs (Ocha), they were quickly seized on as proof by pro-Israel media and commentators that the UN had previously been exaggerating the toll.
They showed 24,686 dead which appeared to be a downward revision from the figure of about 35,000 which had been reported earlier in May, with 7,797 children and 4,959 women confirmed dead, about half the toll cited in previous reports. But the UN said on Monday that estimated overall death toll remained about 35,000.
Farhan Haq, a UN spokesperson, said the new smaller numbers reflected those bodies which had been fully identified. The bigger figures included corpses for whom identification has so far not been completed. Haq said it was expected that, as the process of identification continued, the official tolls among women and children would also rise.
“The overall number of fatalities [was] tallied by the ministry of health in Gaza, which is our counterpart on dealing with the death tolls. That number remains unchanged, and it’s more than 35,000 people since October” Haq said, noting that the UN was not in a position to verify any of the figures. “What’s changed is the ministry of health in Gaza has updated the breakdown of fatalities, for whom full details have been documented.”
“The ministry of health says that the documentation process of fully identifying details of the casualties is ongoing,” he added. Meanwhile … there’s about another 10,000-plus bodies who still have to be fully identified.”
“The United Nations’ teams in Gaza are unable to independently verify those figures given the prevailing situation on the ground and the sheer volume of fatalities,” an Ocha spokesperson, Jens Laerke, said. “It is for this reason that all figures used by the UN clearly cite the health ministry in Gaza as the source. The UN will verify these figures to the extent possible when conditions permit.”
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, appeared to respond to the revised figures by suggesting that the vast majority of all remaining male casualties were Hamas combatants. Claiming that the ratio of Hamas combatants to Gazan civilians killed in the ongoing war was about one to one, he told Dan Senor of the Call Me Back podcast: “Fourteen thousand have been killed, combatants, and, probably around 16,000 civilians have been killed.”
However, given the still high casualty rate of women and children, it would be highly surprising if a significant number of male civilians had not also been killed.
Historically, the UN and other agencies have found that overall figures produced by the Gaza ministry of health have been largely reliable. Among those agencies is the World Health Organization, which says the ministry has “good capacity in data collection” and its previous reporting has been credible and “well developed”.
Research by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem after the 2014 Gaza conflict also found the ministry’s totals were largely consistent with their own survey.
Speaking at the beginning of the conflict, Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch, said he had seen no evidence that the numbers were being manipulated.
“We have been monitoring human rights abuses in the Gaza Strip for three decades, including several rounds of hostilities. We’ve generally found the data that comes out of the ministry of health to be reliable,” he said.
“When we have done our own independent investigations around particular strikes, and we’ve compared those figures against those from the health ministry, there haven’t been major deviations. Their numbers generally are consistent with what we’re seeing on the ground in recent days. There have been hundreds of airstrikes per day in one of the most densely populated areas of the world.”
In previous conflicts, controversy over figures has tended to focus on the classification of male victims of fighting age. Gaza’s ministry of health has not distinguished between fighters and male civilians in casualty figures.
During the 2014 Gaza conflict, some 2,251 Palestinians were killed, according to the UN; 1,462 were believed to be civilians, including 551 children and 299 women, suggesting that more than 600 male civilians were killed, accounting for 40% of the civilian total. Some 780 combatants from militant groups were killed, the UN said, in line with numbers claimed by the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas.
Speaking to the BBC in February, Dr Andreas Krieg, a senior lecturer in security studies at King’s College London, also suggested that the Israel Defense Forces, which has claimed upwards of 12,000 Hamas dead, defined Hamas extremely broadly. “Israel takes a very broad approach to ‘Hamas membership’, which includes any affiliation with the organisation, including civil servants or administrators,” he said.
And an examination of data at the beginning of the current conflict by Prof Michael Spagat, an expert in counting conflict casualties, and the international security expert Daniel Silverman for Action on Armed Violence suggested that “an analysis of the demographics of those fatalities and a careful comparison of them to overall Gazan population suggests that – at least so far – most of the dead have almost certainly been civilians.”
