During last summer's Gaza war, OCHA continously released figures of how many were killed, broken down by civilian and militant. Yet the entire time they always stressed that they were only using preliminary figures, and that they will continue to investigate.
Apparently, that investigation only went in the direction of identifying more civilians, not to reclassify civilians as terrorists when new evidence was revealed.
In September, OCHA-OPT claimed 1,489 civilians killed. The new report says flatly that 1,492 civilians were killed.
This is even though since the war, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other groups have released the details of scores of people who had been initially identified as civilian as beng "mujahid martyrs" for their groups. These were all exhaustively documented by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, whose findings so far show about half of those killed were terrorists.
The UN is quite aware of the work of the Meir Amit Center. They chose to ignore the evidence.
There is no indication that the UN has bothered to check the facts uncovered by the Meir Amit Center ( or the many I have documented) to revise their figures. No NGO that the UN relies on, namely B'Tselem or PCHR or Al Mezan, has to my knowledge refuted a single one of the Meir Amit Center's proofs showing that their claims of civilian victims were often wrong.
The UN's statistics are treated as authoritative by many other organizations and the media, so this is a big deal. In this report, for the first time, the UN is not saying that its numbers are preliminary or still being investigated - it is stating them as fact. These "facts" will be parroted countless times by people who don't know better or who do not want to believe otherwise. It is basic malfeasance on the part of the UN to buttress its false claim that Israel indiscriminately fires at civilians.
Of course, the UN doesn't mention any of the fatalities of Gazans at the hands of Hamas rockets that fell short during the year - even though the report is supposedly about humanitarian issues. It buries a tiny mention of Hamas killing alleged collaborators.
This report proves that if Israel can't be blamed, then the victims become a lot less important.