https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/05/ ... re-so-off/
Why the U.N.’s Gaza Casualty Figures Were So Off
by DAVID ADESNIK, May 14, 2024
The U.N. nearly halved its estimate of women and children killed in Gaza after relying on figures from Hamas-controlled organizations.
The U.N. offered no explanation for the sudden change. On May 6, the body’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) released an infographic showing that more than 9,500 women and 14,500 children had been killed in Gaza. Two days later, OCHA’s updated graphic cut those numbers nearly in half, showing that 4,959 women and 7,797 children had actually lost their lives — a combined reduction of more than 11,000. When a reporter pressed U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq to explain the revision, all he received was a standard disclaimer that “in the fog of war, it’s difficult to come up with numbers.”
True enough, yet for months the U.N. put its trust in numbers generated by Hamas-controlled sources, and the Biden administration put its trust in the U.N. These numbers have served as the basis for relentless criticism of Israel, with Joe Biden accusing it of “indiscriminate bombing” and deciding, ultimately, to withhold shipments of weapons. In his State of the Union address in March, Biden told Congress that 30,000 Palestinians had died in the war, without giving any indication that this number came from a Hamas-run ministry. If 11,000 fewer women and children than previously reported have died, it becomes difficult to portray the Israeli armed forces as an out-of-control war machine.
Were we talking about a minor revision, this might suffice. But how could Gaza authorities have mistakenly added more than 4,500 women and 6,500 children to their casualty count? To answer that, one has to rewind the clock to the early days of the war when both the Health Ministry and the GMO began to claim that 70 percent of the dead in Gaza were women and children. It was an assertion that seemed to settle the question of whether Israeli forces were waging war indiscriminately.
The problem is that the data coming out of the hospitals could not sustain the claim. There were simply too many adult-male bodies to keep the percentage of women and children at or above 70. The GMO response to the problem was simply to keep raising the number of women and children in its toll despite the fact that this left no room for the men.
Broadly speaking, the U.N. has taken a step forward with its decision to employ Health Ministry data, even if it has never explained why it relied on the GMO until now. Yet the Health Ministry remains firmly under the control of Hamas and has credibility issues of its own. Last October, after a nighttime blast at al-Ahli Hospital in northern Gaza, the ministry insisted an Israeli airstrike had resulted in the deaths of 500 civilians. Yet once the sun rose the next morning, the limited size and depth of the crater on hospital grounds made clear that an errant Palestinian rocket had caused the explosion. U.S. intelligence estimated an actual death toll of 100–300. The ministry refused to change its story.
Despite its far lower estimates of female and child fatalities, the Health Ministry still insists that the overall death toll is greater than 35,000 because there are more than 10,000 unidentified individuals among the dead. The U.N. is borrowing that story to justify its continued use of the 35,000 figure, but the number may not hold up, because it is based on what the ministry calls “reliable media sources,” not hospital reports. If the U.N., the Biden administration, and the press corps can summon the skepticism necessary to do a full vetting of the numbers put out by Hamas-controlled sources, many more revisions may be necessary.
