The Gaza Death Toll Is Confusing and Unreliable

Between May 6 and May 8, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) revised its estimates of how many women and children had died in Gaza. The numbers appeared to drop drastically: first, it reported at least 24,000 dead women and children, and two days later, it reported exactly 12,756 “identified” dead women and children. One could be forgiven for wondering whether the UN had raised about 6,700 Gazan children and 4,500 Gazan women from the dead.

OCHA has provided a running body count since the beginning of the Gaza war, and it currently stands at 34,844. This figure was generated by Hamas and is apparently accepted, give or take a few thousand, by Israelis. On a podcast last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu estimated that Israel had killed roughly 14,000 combatants and said the country regretted the deaths of another 16,000 Palestinian civilians. The apparent downward revision was made without any accompanying statement to explain the change or sudden precision. Israel’s military did not make a big deal about it either, probably because there is no way to sound good when celebrating a reduction in the number of children you have killed.

Many noticed anyway. David Adesnik, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, gave the most detailed account of what had happened. For about two months, OCHA had been repeating numbers from Hamas’s Government Media Office, and on May 8 it switched back to Hamas’s Ministry of Health, its source at the beginning of the war. The Ministry of Health is acknowledged to be the more reliable of the two, and it is unclear why OCHA switched to the worse of the two sources, or switched back. A UN spokesperson, Farhan Haq, later explained that the Ministry of Health was “for whatever reason, given the conditions on the ground, unresponsive.” But the Ministry of Health kept publishing statistics in the interim. OCHA didn’t use them.

On Wednesday, Haq said that the UN had “difficulty” verifying Hamas’s numbers but was adamant that the number of total dead remained the same. There was, he said, a “reduction in the number of identified bodies.” To clarify, to the extent possible, Haq seems to be arguing that there are just as many dead Palestinians as before, but many have now lost their identity? Haq makes the discrepancy sound like a minor correction. But the UN so drastically reduced the count of identified women and children that it amounts to an admission that it had been spreading deficient numbers for months.

If you are finding this mystifying, you are not alone. As Adesnik explains, part of the confusion arises from the Ministry of Health’s shifting accounting labels. Its system has evolved, and it now tallies named and identified corpses that have passed through its morgues—as well as, in a separate category, “unidentified” dead, for whom it has neither a body nor a name, just a vaguely-defined “report” from outside the hospital system. If, for example, first responders bring in a body, and they say seven other bodies are probably still under the rubble, the body in the morgue would count as identified and the seven others as unidentified. The additional source of confusion is seriously aberrant numbers from the Government Media Office.

Neither Hamas source, Adesnik writes, has fully explained where it gets its estimate of the number of unaccounted-for dead: more than 10,000 people. During the war, hospitals have stopped functioning, and keeping people alive has taken higher priority than keeping defensible statistics. But these numbers matter—first, because of the dignity of those killed or still living, and second, because total deaths and the ratio of combatant to noncombatant deaths will have implications for judgments about alleged war crimes and genocide.

This is one of those moments when the fog of statistics could be dispersed with just a few sentences of straight talk, of the sort rarely uttered by spokespeople. The UN numbers changed because the UN has little idea how many children have been killed in Gaza, beyond “a lot.” It gets its statistics from Hamas. Where else would it get them? There are no independent epidemiologists in Gaza right now doing the survey work, house to bombed-out house, that would yield reliable numbers. So OCHA used unreliable ones. It never concealed its sources, but it distributed even the most questionable numbers under the UN name.

Operating a statistics laundromat for Hamas’s media wing is embarrassing. But the absence of alternatives is also concerning. Any indictment of OCHA’s numbers should propose better sources for numbers—and, in their absence, ask why there aren’t any. Some of the blame for this absence falls on Hamas, which (in addition to its other flaws) ran a totalitarian state where independent research and criticism were policed and punished. Collecting data that contradicted Hamas’s official figures would be hard or fatal, even in relative peacetime.

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But Israel deserves reproach, too. Unlike Hamas, Israel purports to abide by the principles of the laws of war, including proportionality and distinction between combatants (who can be lawfully targeted) and civilians (who cannot). Hamas has fought with transparent disregard for these principles. Israel has conducted its war opaquely, in such a way that one must take its word that every bomb and every round is dropped or fired lawfully. Its media operations in this war will be remembered as a historic failure that allowed Hamas’s propaganda to be accepted and spread almost without rebuttal.

Much is expected of modern armies that accept, in theory, the burdens of morality and law. One expectation is that they fight in a way that can be examined by outsiders. In Iraq and Afghanistan, reporters routinely accompanied U.S. and other NATO units into battle. At the time, some questioned these embeds and argued that any reporter who depended on a U.S. infantry platoon for his food and safety would inevitably write positively about these soldiers and negatively about whoever was trying to kill them. But a competent reporter would factor those sympathies into her reporting. The main benefit of embeds was that a reporter could observe soldiers and Marines during moments of stress, when they were too busy to groom themselves and pose for PR purposes, and see what they really did and how they really fought. During moments of unguarded intimacy between engagements, they might speak frankly to a reporter. No one can maintain a pose forever. After a week of foot patrols in Fallujah or Kandahar, and a week of meals and billeting with soldiers, a reporter could say with some confidence whether her host unit was killing civilians indiscriminately, or wanted to.

Israel currently embeds zero journalists in Gaza. It isn’t legally obligated to let journalists join its frontline units. But it doesn’t let journalists into Gaza independently, either. “To allow journalists to report safely,” an Israeli military spokesperson told me, the Israel Defense Forces “accompany them when on the battlefield.” He would not say how many journalists had in fact been allowed to accompany IDF units—let alone accompany them on regular operations, rather than short press tours of battle sites after the action. When Hamas alleges that Israeli soldiers are shooting everyone in sight, and murdering families by flattening buildings devoid of military purpose, it can point to the dead children. Israel can deny the charge and hope that the world trusts it over an avowed terrorist group. The world seldom obliges.

To rebut Hamas’s allegations by letting journalists see the war up close would be a calculated risk. Even when conducted legally, war is ugly. It is possible to kill children legally, if for example one is being attacked by an enemy who hides behind them. But the sight of a legally killed child is no less disturbing than the sight of a murdered one. And Israel has discovered that shutting out the press carries its own risks. An infanticide that no one can see is also going to attract suspicion. Unsympathetic observers will think Israel is conducting its war in the manner of other countries whose counterinsurgent forces have preferred to work out of view of independent media. Russia did this in the Second Chechen War; Sri Lanka, in its civil war. Both countries’ militaries had much to hide.

None of this excuses OCHA, which jeopardized its credibility by repeating dubious numbers, long after the reasons for doubting them had been explained. That credibility is a precious resource. The IDF claims to have killed “at least 13,000” combatants—lower than Netanyahu’s estimate—but refused to comment yesterday when I asked if it had any idea how many civilians it had killed. The correct answer is, well, a lot. It would be nice if, before the war is over, some trusted third party could verify this macabre estimate with greater precision.