The United Nations has significantly
adjusted Palestinian casualty figures for the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip,
halving the number of women and children previously reported killed. While more
than 9,500 women and 14,500 children were reported among the fatalities by the
UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) on May 6, two
days later that number was revised significantly downward. Today, under 5,000
women and 8,000 children are now officially listed by the UN as casualties David
Adesnik, director of research at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of
Democracies (FDD), told the National Post he suspects the discrepancy stems
from the UN’s decision to quietly stop using figures provided by the Hamas-run
Government Media Office (GMO). “So you see May 6 and before, the GMO (is listed
as a source); all of a sudden, May 8, they don’t cite a source,” Adesnik told
the Post over the phone on Sunday. He pointed to the similarity between the new
figures and those from a May 2 Gaza Health Ministry (GMH) report as a tip-off
suggesting the UN had ditched the media office’s figures in favour of those
from the health ministry, “even though they don’t say (the Gaza) Health
Ministry in the thing. “So clearly here we’ve done a switch from GMO’s big
number, which never had any clear basis elaborated; like they just offered
nothing but their own assertion. Whereas the Health Ministry does more to back
its stuff up,” he said. The differences between the two datasets was
investigated by Gabriel Epstein of the Washington Institute for Near East
Policy, an American think-tank, who found in late March they yielded “wildly
different and irreconcilable results, indicating that the media reports
methodology is dramatically understating fatalities among adult males, the
demographic most likely to be combatants.”
Epstein argued that his analysis of the two
Hamas-run institutions “undercuts the persistent claim that 72 per cent of
those killed in Gaza are women and children.” Hillel Neuer, the executive
director of UN Watch, an organization that monitors the body’s constellation of
agencies, told the Post that the UN’s approach to monitoring Israel and Gaza is
unique. “The UN’s method of reporting deaths in Gaza is the complete opposite
of what they do in other conflict situations,” Neuer said, pointing to the UN’s
recent efforts in Ukraine where it has established “a defined methodology using
individual records of civilian harm, where a standard of proof was met, namely,
reasonable grounds to believe that the harm took place.” Neuer suggested the
divergent approach is due to institutional anti-Israel bias plaguing the
international community.
“But when Israel can be blamed, it’s the
complete opposite. For reporting Gaza deaths, there is no method, and no
standard of proof. All the UN does is parrot figures supplied by Hamas, which
is laundered and legitimized by the UN as the neutral-sounding ‘Gaza Ministry
of Health,’ or ‘Government Media Office,’ when in fact both are run by the
Hamas terrorist organization.” Neuer called the significant update, which was
not announced, as an admission “essentially … to have been feeding the media
and the world completely false numbers.” The UN Watch leader encouraged the
body to take a page out of its own playbook used during the Syrian Civil War,
“when the UN Human Rights Office announced it had stopped updating the death
toll … because it could no longer verify the sources of information,
acknowledging its inability to verify ‘source material’ from others.”
The news comes a month after the Hamas-run
Ministry of Health publicly disclosed that more than 10,000 previously reported
fatalities had “incomplete data,” lacking basic biographical information such
as their names. Such recent developments have cast serious doubts on earlier
Hamas claims that 70 per cent of Palestinian casualties in the Israel-Hamas War
were either women or children. According to the Times of Israel, the latest
revision would bring the ratio of combatants to civilians killed in the conflict
to nearly 1:1. “Either way, the number would be historically low for modern
urban warfare,” West Point’s urban war studies chair John Spencer wrote in late
March, contextualizing the conduct of Israel’s military operations compared
with other recent urban combat theatres such as Mosul, Iraq, in fighting
against the Islamic State.
Two days after Spencer’s article,
University of Pennsylvania professor Abraham Wyner spoke with the Post
explaining a recent analysis of the Gaza Health Ministry he conducted,
suggesting that the numbers were largely fabricated by Hamas to fit its political
narrative. “Hamas hasn’t provided detailed data since early in the war. And why
should it?” Wyner said via email. “You use what you can.”
National Post
