One of the ongoing arguments about the war in Gaza has been over the reliability of the casualty figures which are routinely updated by the Gaza Health Ministry, an organization under the control of Hamas. Israel has repeatedly questioned those numbers and has argued that a far greater percentage of the death tool is made up of Hamas militants.

Today there are reports that the United Nations has quietly revised its casualty estimates in the last week, cutting the number of women and children killed in the conflict almost in half.

According to an infographic published in OCHA’s daily report on May 6, the number of women killed in the fighting was said to be 9,500, while the organization, which admits to relying on figures from the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza, claimed that 14,500 children had been killed since the war began on Oct. 7. 

Two days later, in its May 8 report, the U.N. agency appeared to have cut the number nearly in half, showing instead that some 4,959 women and 7,797 children had been killed so far in the war, which began after thousands of Hamas-led terrorists infiltrated southern Israel from Gaza, slaughtering more than 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking some 240 people hostage.

So it seems that the UN has cut the total number of confirmed casualties by more than 10,000, but without making any announcement about the change. Israel proclaimed the UN office a "disgrace."

OCHA said it was relying on figures provided by the Palestinian health officials in Gaza and that their tally does not include 10,000 people who are unaccounted for, some possibly buried under rubble. In a disclaimer posted on OCHA's website, the organization said it has not been able to produce independent and verified figures...

Israel has claimed since the early days of the war, that the Hamas health authorities in Gaza were providing the international organization with false figures. "OCHA is a disgrace," said on Israeli official. "They did not even bother to put out an announcement after cutting the number of women and children who had been killed nearly by half." 

The Foreign Ministry said the casualty figures claimed by the Hamas terror group and quoted by UN agencies, are inaccurate, manipulated and do not reflect the reality.

A Washington, DC-based think tank called the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) put out a brief last month noting that even the Gaza Ministry of Health had admitted its casualty figures were based on incomplete information. 

The Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health said on April 6 that it had “incomplete data” for 11,371 of the 33,091 Palestinian fatalities it claims to have documented. In a statistical report, the ministry notes that it considers an individual record to be incomplete if it is missing any of the following key data points: identity number, full name, date of birth, or date of death. The health ministry also released a report on April 3 that acknowledged the presence of incomplete data but did not define what it meant by “incomplete.” In that earlier report, the ministry acknowledged the incompleteness of 12,263 records. It is unclear why, after just three more days, the number fell to 11,371 — a decrease of more than 900 records...

“The sudden shifts in the ministry’s reporting methods suggest it is scrambling to prevent exposure of its shoddy work. For months, U.S. media have taken for granted that the ministry’s top-line figure for casualties was reliable enough to include in daily updates on the war. Even President Biden has cited its numbers. Now we’re seeing that a third or more of the ministry’s data may be incomplete at best — and fictional at worst.” — David Adesnik, Senior Fellow and Director of Research

FDD published a follow-up just over a week ago saying that more than 10,000 of those on the list have no names.

The Gaza Ministry of Health cannot provide names of more than 10,000 of the 34,000 individuals it says have died during the war between Israel and Hamas. While the Health Ministry conceded earlier this month that it has “incomplete data” for nearly one-third of the deceased, this is the first admission that it lacks an essential data point necessary to establish these deaths have even taken place...

As of April 21, 10,152 records had incomplete data. What remains unclear is the degree to which these records are incomplete. An explanatory note in the April 1 digest says incomplete records lack one or more of five basic data points: ID number, full name, sex, date of birth, or date of death. It is now clear the ministry does not have names for these individuals; how much data it does have remains unknown.

So the Health Ministry said they had incomplete data for 10,152 deaths about 3 weeks ago and the the UN just removed 10,405 deaths from its total. It sounds like the UN has just decided to remove all of the records with incomplete data from their tally. According to the FDD, that is what happened and the result is that the percentages of women and children killed in the war have dropped dramatically.

As of April 1, the ministry also stopped repeating the claim it made since the first weeks of the war that 70 percent of the dead were women and children, even suggesting the media invented this number. Meanwhile, the GMO continues to promote the 70 percent figure while revising its own numbers upwards, to remain consistent with that claim.

Israel has been saying for some time that the Gazan death toll is propaganda. Now even the UN and the Gaza Health Ministry are admitting they can't back up the figures they have been issuing for months. 

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.

Let's see if this change gets widely reported.

Update: Here's the UN briefing from last Friday where deputy spokesman Farhan Haq was asked about the numbers. He seems to be suggesting the UN did some work to verify the numbers but based on the above that's not true. All the UN did was subtract the numbers the Gaza Health Ministry admitted were incomplete. And it seems it took them more than a month to do that.