UN Watch Response

Accusing Israel of killing more than 30,000 innocent civilians in Gaza or claiming that this number includes mostly women and children repeats lies from the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry. Hamas is a terrorist organization which is inherently unreliable and has an interest in inflating casualty numbers to increase international pressure on Israel for a ceasefire. These numbers have never been independently verified. Hamas itself recently admitted that data was incomplete for 11,371 of the 33,091 fatalities it claims.[1]

There are many reasons why the Hamas casualty numbers should not be taken at face value, including the following:

• The Hamas number does not differentiate between civilians and combatants. Hamas has acknowledged that 6,000 of the dead are its fighters.[2] However, according to the IDF, the number of combatants killed is far higher, around 14,000,[3] which translates to a civilian to combatant ratio of less than 2 civilians for every 1 combatant killed.[4] While all civilian casualties in war are tragic, this ratio is better than in other recent urban conflicts where the average is 1 combatant to 9 civilians according to the UN.[5]
• The Hamas number includes fatalities caused by its own misfired rockets, thus wrongly blaming those deaths on Israel. According to the IDF, one in five Gaza rockets misfires, killing Palestinians.[6] Indeed, although Israel was originally blamed for the October 17^th strike on the Al-Ahli Hospital, it was quickly determined that the casualties were caused by a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket.[7]
• The Hamas number fails to account for the terrorist group’s own recruitment and use of child soldiers. The death of any child in war is heartbreaking, but if a child under the age of 18 is killed while participating in hostilities, that child is considered a combatant and, therefore, a lawful military target.[8]

Moreover, the Hamas data has been heavily criticized on several grounds, including that the data is based, not only on information from hospitals and morgues, but also on unspecified “reliable media sources” and self-reporting from Gazans through a Google form.[9] Even the UN’s OCHA acknowledged in December that this Hamas’s “methodology is unknown.”[10]

Indeed, that Hamas data consistently underreports adult male civilian fatalities even though adult men constitute 25% of the Gaza population. This is clear from Hamas’s insistence that 70% of the dead are women and children, while at the same time it admits that 20% (~6,000 fatalities) are its fighters, which means that only the remaining 10% can be adult male civilians—significantly less than it should be proportionally.[11] The underreporting of adult male deaths is also clear in the Flash Updates published by the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which show unrealistically low numbers of men being killed, e.g., 216 new fatalities on October 31, 2024, comprised of 210 women and children, and only six men.[12] These flash updates also contain other inconsistencies, such as the total number of women and children claimed killed exceeding the total number of deaths reported altogether for a particular day.[13] Notably, on May 8, 2024, OCHA significantly reduced its Gaza casualty numbers, cutting the numbers of women and children killed by nearly 50%—from 9,500 women to under 5,000 and from 14,500 children to 8,000.[14]