Two interesting things have happened recently with the statistics issued by the Gaza ministry of health.
Up until March 13, the MoH statement said - every day - that 72% of all those killed in Gaza since October 7 had been women and children, a patently ridiculous number as we've shown previously.
They no longer make that claim in their daily reports. And they seem to have dropped that claim just when articles started to appear that challenged the numbers as being essentially impossible statistically.
There's been another recent change in how the ministry reports deaths in the past week or so. They used to divide up their numbers into two categories, those that they counted themselves in hospitals and those that they received from "trusted media sources" - which is the Hamas media office.
For several weeks, the ministry has been asking people to go online to register the deaths that the ministry might not have direct knowledge of. I do not believe that they are trying to lie here: the ministry itself seems to want to count accurately, but Hamas forces it to issue the counts of total deaths that are much higher than they can verify themselves.
Here's their breakdown:
Women 4577
Children 7007
Seniors 1628
Men 8508
Total 21720
But the total that Hamas forces them to say, as of April 4, was 33,037 - a difference of 11,317 that they did not count directly or through the relatives.
If we assume that the 72% women and children casualties claimed has remained consistent from March 13 to April 4, that means that of the over 12,000 of those 11,317 deaths are women and children.
Which is literally impossible.
If we give the benefit of the doubt and say that every single death between March 13 (when they stopped making the 72% claim) and April 4 was a fighting-age male, that still means that 97% of the deaths that do not come directly from the MoH must be women and children.
Which is nearly as impossible.
Yet despite the numbers not adding up, UN agencies continue to parrot the Hamas figures. UNICEF's chief Catherine Russell tweeted that over 13,000 children had "reportedly" been killed, thousands more than the real number.
