The UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) releases impact reports on the situation in Israel and Gaza every two to three days. It revised its tallies last week to show that approximately 5,000 women and 7,800 children have been killed as of April 30.
Al Jazeera Staff comments that changes in how the UN calculates Gaza’s casualties have been cited as evidence of bias. They aren’t.
Has the UN really said fewer people were killed by Israel in Gaza?
No, is the short answer. (Al Jazeera Staff, n.d.)
The figures for bodies that had been identified were seized on by many media outlets as the UN “revising down” its estimates of the number of women and children Israel had killed in its assault on Gaza.
Rather, the UN was publishing the latest information from Gaza’s MoH about its progress in a massive effort to identify the dead.
The UN confirmed this on Monday, when spokesperson Farhan Haq, responding to a question from Al Jazeera’s Gabriel Elizondo, said that the updated breakdown was only in reference to the smaller 24,686 death toll.
“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 reestablished once the full identification process is complete,” Haq said at the UN in New York.
Critics often criticise the MoH for being administered by Hamas, implying that its figures are not to be trusted. (Al Jazeera Staff, n.d.)
However, the World Health Organization (WHO) stated on Tuesday that it has full confidence in the MoH’s numbers.
MoH statistics have also been verified by Human Rights Watch and used by the United States Department of State in past conflicts and as recently as March 2023, despite US President Joe Biden questioning those numbers without evidence.
What is this ‘new number’?
The so-called “new number” of 24,686 refers only to bodies that have been identified – of those, 7,797 were children, 4,959 women and 1,924 were elderly people.
This means that more than 10,000 recovered bodies are still unidentified. (Al Jazeera Staff, n.d.)
During an appearance on the Call Me Back podcast, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared to reference the change, saying the Israeli army had “been able to keep the ratio of civilians to combatants killed … [to] a ratio of about one to one”.
“Fourteen thousand have been killed, combatants,” he continued, “and probably around 16,000 civilians have been killed.” (Al Jazeera Staff, n.d.)
Nick Logan of CBC News reports that women, children still account for more than half of identified victims after UN agency revises figures.
The overall number of Palestinians killed hasn't changed, but from the end of March until last week, the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported the deaths of at least 9,500 women and 14,500 children.
Its Friday update said that as of May 9, there were 34,904 reported fatalities in Gaza since Oct. 7, the day Hamas-led militants attacked Israel. Soon after, the Israeli military began bombarding the territory with airstrikes. It launched a ground operation in the weeks that followed.
That number, OCHA stated, does not include about 10,000 people reported missing or believed to be buried in the rubble of the more than 370,000 homes that Israeli bombs have damaged or destroyed in the past seven months.
The breakdown of the casualties, however, only includes 24,686 identified fatalities as of April 30.
From that figure, OCHA has recorded 10,006 were Palestinian men, accounting for 40 per cent of the identified fatalities, while 4,959 (20 per cent) were women and 7,797 were children (32 per cent). It also listed 1,924 elderly people among the fatalities, but did not differentiate them by gender. (Logan, n.d.)
OCHA also lists the number of reported fatalities in the Oct. 7 attack — figures that come from Israeli authorities and that have also fluctuated since the immediate aftermath — as well as the number of Israeli soldiers killed in Gaza.
In its most recent report, OCHA said there were approximately 1,200 fatalities in Israel on Oct. 7. That includes civilians, foreign nationals and hundreds of Israeli soldiers and security forces. Of those, 1,162 have been identified, including at least 33 children.
In the agency's earliest reports following the attacks, the initial number of OCHA-reported Israeli deaths, based on government data, was at least 1,400. (Logan, n.d.)
Numbers cited without details are another example of the First Causality in war phenomena. Knowing the origin of the numbers and the detailed breakdown of changes in reports help clarify the confidence we can attach to the data.
References
Al Jazeera Staff. (n.d.). Did the UN really say Israel has killed fewer people in Gaza? Al Jazeera. Retrieved May 15, 2024, from https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/5/14/has-the-un-really-said-fewer-people-were-killed-by-israel-in-gaza?
Logan, N. (n.d.). Why the UN changed its death tolls of Palestinian women and children killed in Gaza. CBC News. Retrieved May 15, 2024, from https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/gaza-women-children-death-toll-1.7203167
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