UN Radically Lowers Gaza Casualty Estimate (Or Maybe Not)
The release of a second set of figures has created a lot of hyperbole.
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.
That is the critical point.
@mattbernius:
But that’s exactly how Israel has categorized casualties in any strikes for many years. And I believe the US also adopted that policy for drone strikes (corrections welcome).
Just as a frame of reference about 40% of the people who died in the towers on 9/11 still dont have identifiable remains. Looking at the destruction of buildings in Gaza and some of the bomb craters suggests that in Gaza they will also have a significant percentage of deaths that will never be identified and since they are working in a war zone it will take longer to find and identify bodies still accessible. Neither side is reliable on numbers but as noted outside agencies have found the numbers in the past for identified deaths to be pretty accurate. We can argue about the number and make up of the unidentified but the number is surely in the many thousands.
Steve
Obviously it is horrific. But just as obviously 1.6% of the total population is not genocide as so many of the commentariat here were so eager to call it within a week of hostilities starting. It seems very much in line with what @Andy has suggested is a pretty careful military operation, given the level of difficulty presented by urban warfare.
And given that Gaza has been ‘on the edge of famine’ for many months, are we seeing starvation deaths? How about rampant disease?
The most on-point criticism of Israel’s conduct of this war is not ‘genocide’ or ‘indiscriminate targeting of women and children,’ but the fact that Netanyahu has yet to conceive of any sort of plan for what comes after. The fact that Hamas is back in Gaza City is proof that Israel has not yet developed a plan. But ‘come up with a plan!’ doesn’t have the poetry of ‘from the river to the sea!’ which is an actual genocidal slogan from the people who are directly responsible for all this horror: Hamas.
It’s 1968 all over again, and just like then the yutes are out waving the flags of a murderous enemy and completely missing what was the far more important point both then and now: that no one had an end game.
Which brings me back to my starting position: this is a tragedy without a solution because what we have here is two people who want to eat the same cake. More can-kicking and lawn-mowing ahead.
@Assad K:
Can you unpack what you mean by that?
@Michael Reynolds:
Agreed. It’s systematic ethnic cleansing, with a side of gratuitous harm.
Oh please. Cutting off the food, water, and aid to millions while rendering their cities uninhabitable is not “a pretty careful military operation.” The actual military rules of engagement being followed, and the complete absence of any after-action assistance to injured civilians, would get any US commander court-martialed and convicted — check out Secretary Austin’s 2023 memorandum on civilian harm mitigation and response. Just because it isn’t genocide doesn’t mean it isn’t wanton slaughter.
Explains why people who’ve staked claim on either side of this ethnoreligious conflict increasingly sound cray cray. After 7 Oct, here’s no reason to trust anything Hamas says. Their casualty numbers are unreliable, because the source is unreliable. Honest in the past? Meh.
Similary, there’s no good reason to trust a government led by incompetent thugs like Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir. If Israel’s leadership were “careful,” 7 Oct would not have happened. Areas bordering Gaza would not have been left unguarded in pursuit of genocide / ethnic cleansing in the West Bank — after years of Netanyahu boosting Hamas to thwart a two-state solution.
A careful military operation does not kill surrendering hostages it’s supposed to be trying to rescue, repeatedly kill aid workers, repeatedly kill journalists, and repeatedly commit war crimes.
It’s mystifying why intelligent Americans twist themselves to give violent religious fanatics the benefit of the doubt. For what? Maybe they are too dug into outdated, obsolete priors to admit Gaza and Israel are currently controlled by dishonest, vicious, violent religious fanatics.
At least Biden seems to be waking up to the awful truth: every Mid-East actor should be handled with dispassionate, cold-blooded realpolitik that advances US interests. Nothing more.
“are we seeing starvation deaths? ”
Doctors without borders people have reported that severe malnutrition has lead to the deaths of people from traumas that they would normally expect to survive.
Steve
No, it’s actually a 47.8% and 46.2% reduction, respectively. The Times of Israel used the wrong dividend and then rounded incorrectly for the children number. Not a big difference, it’s still around half, it’s just irritating when reporters can’t do what my 10-year-old can.
More to my point: I realize that a difference of thousands of people is quite significant, especially to the people who may not be dead now. But I’ll be honest, I don’t think the precise number changes the tragedy; i.e. there’s no reason for the Gaza Health Ministry to make up numbers which would only undermine their credibility.
Theres also the 10,000 plus unidentified bodies, and the people whose bodies haven’t been recovered because they are under rubble. So, a minimum of 35,000, and likely much higher.
(There are reports of N thousand “known missing”, but we don’t know how many of those are in that 10,000 unidentified bodies, and how good the record keeping is. Counting dead bodies is easier)
All for a war with no vision of what comes next.
This genocide, sparkling mass slaughter of civilians, ethnic cleansing (can you have ethnic cleansing without a place to put the refugees?), whatever you want to call it… it’s not a means to an ends, it’s the ends itself.
@steve:
Additionally, starvation is a trailing form of disease and death in refugee camps. And that tallying takes time.
Children will be the first to die as their bodies have a much harder time with malnutrition. And there are signs that is beginning: https://www.who.int/news/item/19-02-2024-children-s-lives-threatened-by-rising-malnutrition-in-the-gaza-strip
Also, this headline is just wrong. They didn’t lower the casualty estimate, they recategorized the dead, changing gender and age. The identified dead and the unidentified dead still add up to the same over 35,000.
Hamas is not the “de facto” government, they are the elected government of Gaza in as Jimmy Carter said, in a fair and legitimate election.
And the 10,000 figure is not the “unidentified” but an estimate of the unrecovered casualties, those still in the rubble.
@mattbernius:
Sorry for any confusion, I was referring to the line in the OP that you had also referred to: “And we surely can’t assume that every single male over 19 killed was a Hamas fighter.” It’s my understanding that for many years Israel has labeled any man killed within a certain age range (16-64? 18-64?) as a militant, and that the US was pretty much following the same policy for victims of drone strikes. As I said, I could be incorrect in my information.
When this dropped a few days ago, it was pretty surprising to learn that the UN had been using GMO numbers. GMO is basically a propaganda arm for Hamas. Lots of people can legitimately criticize – and have – the Gaza Ministry of Health (GMoH), but they at least of a track record and a methodology. That the UN was using the GMO is bad, it has zero credibility.
Secondly the GMoH historic reliability is based on a much different situation that is currently the case and has been for several months. Prior to this war, the GMoH could get an accurate count of numbers killed because bodies would come to hospitals and be identified and counted. They wouldn’t necessarily be honest about who the person was (ie. membership in Hamas), but they could and did count bodies reliably in hospitals for the most part from what outsiders could tell.
That practice continued for about the first month of the current war. Since then, the GMoH has been counting deaths via “reliable media sources” and has relied much less on counting actual bodies. But it does not specify what those sources are much less cite specific reports, so there is no way to determine where they are getting their information from. Despite this pretty substantial change in methodology, people persist in saying their statistics are reliable based on historical methodology that is no longer relevant. They still count bodies, but a lot of it is “trust us bro” counting that cannot be independently verified at all.
And we also have evidence that the GMoH outright lies. The best-known example is the explosion at the al-Ahli hospital, which was immediately claimed by the GMoH to be an Israeli airstrike that killed 500 civilians. The GMoH eventually revised the death toll down to 471 with several hundred wounded which no expert who looked at the site and the damage believes is a credible number. And the GMoH still blames Israel for the “massacre” even though everyone knows it was a Palestinian rocket.
Anyway, I suggest practicing a lot of skepticism and attaching large error bars in both directions to any figures that anyone cites.
James is correct that it’s really impossible to know – Israel and Hamas both have strong incentives to lie, and even if they didn’t, counting deaths in the middle of a conflict is difficult and usually a low priority compared to other things like fighting and not dying. Even after conflicts are over, it’s very frequently the case that the total number of casualties is never known for certain and can be an estimate with variations in the thousands in either direction. You also have attribution – people would die normally from various causes, plus many people may die from the indirect effects of war, not violence.
Another point is that one shouldn’t attribute all the civilian deaths to the Israelis, which I see many people do. While I do not doubt that Israel has killed many more civilians than Hamas because of the dynamics of the conflict, the firepower asymmetry, and Hamas’ tactics, the reality of urban war in terrain occupied by civilians is that they get killed from both sides. Hamas fires rockets, many of which are low quality, which fall and explode inside Gaza, such as the incident at Al Ahli hospital. As noted above, the GMoH claims these were killed by Israel and in fact I’ve never found a case in this war where they’ve claim that any civilian has been killed by anyone other than Israel.
@JKB:
They were elected for a fixed term, and overstayed that term, never calling for elections again. Most people in Gaza were not even born when Hamas was elected.
I understand that you may have trouble understanding that governments should step down at the end of their term, given your support for Generalissimo Trump.
So, your claim is that every body recovered from rubble has been identified? Or do you think that if they cannot identify a body they stick it back under the rubble for safekeeping?
Are you naturally this stupid, or do you have to work at it? Or are you just lying?
@Andy:
FWIW, that phrase caused me to immediately go to other sources, which in fact confirmed what you said. But “everyone knows” is so often used by those spouting BS they thought they heard somewhere once that it set off alarm bells as soon as I read it.
@Gustopher:
Just as a point of fact, the 10k missing and buried in rubble estimate comes from the GMO – the propaganda arm – and has no evidentiary basis. By contrast, the GMoH says there are about 3,700 currently reported missing based on reporting by family members. The UN, for some reason, is still using the GMO number in it’s figures.
@Michael Reynolds:
You’re right, it’s not genocide. It is ethnic cleansing.
“Voluntary”. Yeah.
@Assad K:
TY. I cannot speak to US drone strikes but I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case–either during it’s opaque escalation under Trump or even previously.
@gVOR10:
It would be ethnic cleansing if this policy was implemented.
But Ben-Gvir is outside the War Cabinet which is determining policy.
It’s rather telling that he is speaking at a protest march demanding this be done, which is a curious position for a minister, if you think about it.
That he needs to address a protest march to push a policy he supports, indicates that it is not government policy, and that he lacks the strength to make it so.
@Assad K:
Just to add my 2 cents here. At least for the US – I can’t speak for Israel – this is true, but it’s also a tautology. The US will only strike people it believes are militants, so of course it will say that any man it’s killed will be a militant, because it doesn’t (intentionally) strike non-militants.
The rub, of course, it determining who is and isn’t a militant. Now, if Hamas or whoever followed the laws of war, this would be easy, but since they don’t, this is often hard. Since they don’t identify themselves as combants as required by law, the US and Israel have to determine who is and isn’t a combatant by other means. Usually this is behavior. In the most obvious case, if you have a gun and are shooting at US troops, then you are by definition and enemy combatant and can be killed. That is the easiest call to make. But it gets more difficult in other situations.
In my experience with drones supporting operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Africa, we looked for many different criteria, such as weapons, location, what they were doing, who were they with, sometimes they did have identifying clothing on.
A lot of my time was spent scanning roads and paths looking for people planting IED’s. This almost always happened at night, and there were patterns to this activity that showed it was not something else – like armed guards pulling security. Digging/emplacing the IED in complete darkness with no light, running wires, setting up sighting sticks for the trigger man, etc.
But it’s also possible and easy to make mistakes; there is a public record of the many mistakes the US made over decades. Interpreting human behavior from a distance in a war is not cut and dry, and some of those mistakes have even resulted in killing our own troops, so it’s just a very difficult problem a lot of the time.
@Andy:
Indeed. But it’s also possible to tell the difference between people who are trying hard not to make those mistakes, and people who genuinely don’t care because they think of those particular civilians as “the enemy”.
For US forces in Afghanistan, any guesses about what the ratio was for “enemy combatants” versus “collateral damage”? I’m guessing it wasn’t 10:1 collateral, or worse.