Gaza ministry revises down figures for women and children confirmed killed

A Palestinian child looks out of a tent in a displacement camp in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, 13 May 2024. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Gaza’s Hamas-run ministry of health has revised down figures for the number of women and children confirmed killed in the conflict in the coastal strip.

The revised totals, which first appeared on the website of the UN’s office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs (Ocha) were seized on as proof by pro-Israel media and commentators that the UN had quietly reassessed civilian casualty rates. However, Ocha told the Guardian that the revised figures had been produced by the Hamas ministry and had not been verified by the UN.

The Guardian also understands that the new figures provided by the Gaza health ministry relate to 24,686 “fully documented cases” out of an estimated 34,622 deaths recorded by 30 April, suggesting an ongoing verification process.

According to that criteria 7,797 children – rather than 14,500 – are listed as confirmed killed, with confirmed fatalities among women accounting for 4,959 deaths, rather than 9,500 as previously recorded, with a new confirmed total of 12,756 women and children killed.

The overall total of all deaths in Gaza – including militants and male civilians – remained largely unchanged at about 35,000. The figures include almost 2000 elderly people killed during the conflict and about 10,060 men.

While the figures were seized by some as proof that the UN had been misled by inaccurate figures, an Ocha spokesperson said that they had been supplied by the ministry of health and Ocha had not been able to verify them.

“The breakdowns in question have been published by the ministry of health in Gaza,” said Jens Laerke. “The figures from the ministry of health can vary based on the verification process that they undertake.

“The United Nations’ teams in Gaza are unable to independently verify those figures given the prevailing situation on the ground and the sheer volume of fatalities. It is for this reason that all figures used by the UN clearly cite the health ministry in Gaza as the source. The UN will verify these figures to the extent possible when conditions permit.”

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, appeared to respond to the figures by suggesting that the vast majority of all remaining male casualties were Hamas combatants. Claiming that the ratio of Hamas combatants to Gazan civilians killed in the ongoing war was about one to one, he told Dan Senor of the Call Me Back podcast: “Fourteen thousand have been killed, combatants, and, probably around 16,000 civilians have been killed.”

However, given the still-high casualty rate of women and children, it would be highly surprising if a significant number of male civilians had not also been killed.

Historically the UN and other agencies have found that overall figures produced by the Gaza ministry of health have been largely reliable. Among those agencies is the World Health Organization, which says the ministry has “good capacity in data collection” and its previous reporting has been credible and “well developed”.

Research by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem following the 2014 Gaza conflict also found the ministry’s totals were largely consistent with their own survey.

Speaking at the beginning of the conflict, Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch, said he had seen no evidence that the numbers were being manipulated.

“We have been monitoring human rights abuses in the Gaza Strip for three decades, including several rounds of hostilities. We’ve generally found the data that comes out of the ministry of health to be reliable,” he said.

“When we have done our own independent investigations around particular strikes, and we’ve compared those figures against those from the health ministry, there haven’t been major deviations. Their numbers generally are consistent with what we’re seeing on the ground in recent days. There have been hundreds of airstrikes per day in one of the most densely populated areas of the world.”

In previous conflicts controversy over figures has tended to focus on the classification of male victims of fighting age, with Gaza’s ministry of health not distinguishing between fighters and male civilians in casualty figures.

During the 2014 Gaza conflict, some 2,251 Palestinians were killed, according to the UN; 1,462 were believed to be civilians, including 551 children and 299 women, suggesting more than 600 male civilians were killed, accounting for 40% of the civilian total. Some 780 combatants from militant groups were killed, the UN said, in line with numbers claimed by the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas.

Speaking to the BBC in February Dr Andreas Krieg, a senior lecturer in security studies at King’s College London, also suggested that the Israel Defense Forces, which has claimed upwards of 12,000 Hamas dead, defined Hamas extremely broadly. “Israel takes a very broad approach to ‘Hamas membership’, which includes any affiliation with the organisation, including civil servants or administrators,” he said.

And an examination of data at the beginning of the current conflict by Prof Michael Spagat, an expert in counting conflict casualties, and the international security expert Daniel Silverman for Action on Armed Violence suggested that “an analysis of the demographics of those fatalities and a careful comparison of them to overall Gazan population suggests that – at least so far – most of the dead have almost certainly been civilians.”