United Nations halves estimate of women and children killed in Gaza

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The United Nations has significantly adjusted Palestinian casualty figures for the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip, halving the number of women and children previously reported killed.

While more than 9,500 women and 14,500 children were reported among the fatalities by the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) on May 6, two days later that number was revised significantly downward. Today, under 5,000 women and 8,000 children are now officially listed by the UN as casualties.

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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.

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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.”

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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.”

The news comes a month after the Hamas-run Ministry of Health publicly disclosed that more than 10,000 previously reported fatalities had “incomplete data,” lacking basic biographical information such as their names. Such recent developments have cast serious doubts on earlier Hamas claims that 70 per cent of Palestinian casualties in the Israel-Hamas War were either women or children. According to the Times of Israel, the latest revision would bring the ratio of combatants to civilians killed in the conflict to nearly 1:1.

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“Either way, the number would be historically low for modern urban warfare,” West Point’s urban war studies chair John Spencer wrote in late March, contextualizing the conduct of Israel’s military operations compared with other recent urban combat theatres such as Mosul, Iraq, in fighting against the Islamic State.

Two days after Spencer’s article, University of Pennsylvania professor Abraham Wyner spoke with the Post explaining a recent analysis of the Gaza Health Ministry he conducted, suggesting that the numbers were largely fabricated by Hamas to fit its political narrative.

“Hamas hasn’t provided detailed data since early in the war. And why should it?” Wyner said via email. “You use what you can.”

National Post

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