WASHINGTON – The United Nations has cut its estimates of the number of women and children killed during Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip by almost half, calling for a re-examination of figures provided by the militant group Hamas.
Of the 34,735 people who have died in Gaza since the war began, more than 9,500 were women and over 14,500 were children, according to data released by the UN on May 6.
But in updated data released two days later on May 8, the UN significantly reduced the number: among the 34,844 people said to have been killed in Gaza were 4,959 women and 7,797 children.
In determining the number of casualties, the UN relies on data from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Ministry of Health. The UN reports come with a caveat stating: “The UN has not yet been able to provide independent, comprehensive and verified casualty figures.”
In a statement to USA TODAY, UN spokeswoman Eri Kaneko said the total death toll for Gaza provided by the Health Ministry remained unchanged, citing the ministry’s April 30 update with the breakdown of the 24,686 deaths for which the ministry has full information.
“According to the ministry, among the fatalities whose exact details have been documented, there are 7,797 children, 4,959 women, 1,924 elderly people and 10,006 men,” Kaneko said. “The Ministry of Health points out that the process of documenting the full identification data of the victims is still ongoing.”
The updated UN breakdown of casualties does not include the more than 10,000 people the Gaza Strip’s Health Ministry classifies as “missing or buried under rubble” in Gaza.
Last month, Gaza’s Health Ministry said via its Telegram channel that it had incomplete data on 11,371 deaths it claimed to have documented. A data set is considered incomplete if a person’s identity number, full name, date of birth or date of death is missing, the ministry said in the report.
Kaneko said UN teams in Gaza had been unable to independently verify the figures due to “the prevailing situation on the ground and the sheer number of casualties.”
“That is why all figures used by the UN are cited as the source of the Ministry of Health in Gaza,” she said. “The UN will verify these figures to the best of its ability, when conditions permit.”
The Jerusalem Post was the first to report on the revised estimates.
After initially expressing skepticism last year about the accuracy of the numbers provided by Hamas, President Joe Biden began citing death figures from Gaza’s Health Ministry in recent months, including during his State of the Union address to Congress in March.
Israeli officials have long disputed the death toll reported by Hamas, including the proportion of women and children killed during the war. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said more than 13,000 Hamas “terrorists” were among the Palestinians killed in Gaza since the war began on October 7.
“Hamas would like the world to believe that most of the casualties and deaths were women and children, an argument that was almost universally accepted until recently,” wrote Elliott Abrams, senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank, in a blog post.
“Now even the UN, or part of the UN, is tacitly admitting that it blindly accepted Hamas’s numbers, which were intended to mislead,” said Abrams, a former deputy national security adviser to President George W. Bush.
According to the latest UN figures, 40 percent of the victims in Gaza were men, 32 percent children, 20 percent women and 8 percent elderly.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: UN estimate of Gaza deaths among women and children halved
