Did the UN really say fewer people were killed by Israel in Gaza?
No, that’s the short answer.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) published an infographic on May 8 referring to a total of 34,844 Palestinian deaths.
Below, it says about the deaths: “24,686 identified as of April 30 as follows: 10,006 men, 4,959 women, 7,797 children, 1,924 elderly.”
The chart used figures from Gaza’s Ministry of Health and included a note that the figures “do not include more than 10,000 people missing or under rubble.”
The figures for identified bodies were reported by numerous media outlets as the UN “revised downwards” its estimates of the number of women and children Israel had killed during its attack on Gaza.
Rather, the UN was releasing the latest information from Gaza’s health ministry on its progress in a massive effort to identify the dead.
The UN confirmed this on Monday, when spokesperson Farhan Haq, responding to a question from Tel Aviv Tribune’s Gabriel Elizondo, said the updated toll only referred to the smaller death toll of 24,686.
“There are about 10,000 more bodies that are yet to be fully identified, and so the details of those – which are children, which are women – will be restored once the full identification process is completed,” Haq said . at the UN in New York.
What was the “initial” estimate?
The estimated total number of people killed by Israel in Gaza and those missing under the rubble or elsewhere has never changed.
As of Tuesday, the total number of people killed by Israel in Gaza since the war began more than seven months ago stood at 35,173.
Eighty-two of these people have been killed in the last 24 hours.
Where do the casualty figures come from?
All casualty figures – identified and unidentified deaths – as well as missing persons are generated by the Gaza Ministry of Health.
Critics often accuse the Health Ministry of being administered by Hamas, implying that its figures cannot be trusted.
However, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday it had full confidence in the Health Ministry’s figures.
The Health Ministry statistics have also been verified by Human Rights Watch and used by the United States Department of State during past conflicts and through March 2023, although US President Joe Biden has questioned these figures without proof.
What is this “new number”?
The so-called “new figure” of 24,686 refers only to the bodies that have been identified – of these, 7,797 were children, 4,959 women and 1,924 elderly people.
This means that more than 10,000 bodies found remain unidentified.
Additionally, an estimated 10,000 people are still missing, most likely buried under rubble across Gaza.
Will this figure change?
“The fact that we now have 25,000 people identified is a step forward,” WHO spokesperson Christian Lindmeier told reporters in Geneva on Tuesday.
“There are around 10,000 other bodies that have yet to be fully identified, and so the details of those – which are children, which are women – will be restored once the full identification process is complete.” » said UN spokesperson Haq.
Israel is under constant international pressure over the death toll in Gaza.
Some media outlets seized on the breakdown of the numbers because the UN had revised its figures to make them “more realistic” – without specifics – as evidence of anti-Israeli bias within the UN.
In recent days, Egypt – with which Israel has had a truce since 1979 – joined South Africa’s complaint against Israel at the International Court of Justice, accusing Israel of genocide.
During an appearance on the Call Me Back podcast, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared to reference this change, saying that the Israeli military had “been able to maintain the ratio of civilians to combatants killed…(at) a ratio about one to one. .
“Fourteen thousand fighters were killed,” he continued, “and probably around 16,000 civilians were killed.”