MIKE WAGENHEIM (JNS.org 12-5-24)
The United Nations now claims that “the fog of war” is to blame for a major overstatement of the number of Gazan children who have been killed in the war.
In mid-March, the U.N. Children’s Fund stated that 13,450 children had been killed in Gaza, citing figures from the Hamas-run Gazan Health Ministry. Catherine Russell, the director of UNICEF, said in a television interview on March 17 that those numbers were “staggering” and “really shocking,” and “We haven’t seen that rate of death among children in almost any other conflict in the world.”
Last Wednesday, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) released updated casualty figures. Some 7,797 Gazan children had died in the war as of April 30, it said—a roughly 42% drop from the mid-March numbers.
JNS asked Farhan Haq, deputy spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, at a press conference on Friday why the math doesn’t add up.
“The revisions are taken ... you know, of course, in the fog of war, it’s difficult to come up with numbers,” Haq told JNS. “We get numbers from different sources on the ground, and then we try to cross-check them. As we cross-check them, we update the numbers, and we’ll continue to do that as that progresses.”
The 13,450 statistic was cited frequently in the international press, leading to accusations that Israel had committed war crimes, including targeting babies and children intentionally.
Even Hamas has since admitted that those numbers have turned out to be off by at least 40%. The United Nations revised its numbers last week, without providing an explanation.
“When it comes to Israel, it’s clear that the U.N.’s goal is not accuracy, but rather to immediately seize on any report, no matter how unsubstantiated or even manifestly false, in order to portray Israel as malevolent,” Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, told JNS.
“The right thing for the U.N. to do now would be to admit that their casualty count in Gaza is a complete failure,” Neuer added.
OCHA also revised its casualty figures for women by nearly a half—from more than 9,500 to fewer than 5,000.
In a little-noticed change, OCHA differentiated in its new figures between “reported” and “identified” fatalities, including the 7,797 children figure in the “identified” category.
Using OCHA’s math, out of 10,158 reported but unidentified casualties, 5,653 (56%) would have to be children to add up to the figures published in mid-March. That would be far more than is indicated by the information the United Nations released last week, which claims that children make up 32% of the identified deaths in Gaza.
Salo Aizenberg, an independent scholar and author, as well as a board member of HonestReporting, told JNS that “it’s absolutely true that the fog of war makes it difficult to assess casualties, but this was the case from the beginning of the war.”
“It’s outrageous that only seven months later, the U.N. is questioning the Hamas-supplied casualty numbers,” he said.
In early April, the Gaza Health Ministry said it had “incomplete data” for 11,371 of the 33,091 Palestinian fatalities it claimed to have documented at the time. The ministry later said it did not have names for more than 10,000 of the Gazans it claimed were killed in the war.
The ministry has not revealed publicly how it compiles its published information.
