The BBC is lying, and the UN is twisting numbers.
The UN is only counting what they call "verified" deaths, which is only 8,119 Gazans - not the 40,000+ that the health ministry claims. They are saying that among those "verified" deaths, 70% are women and children.
That's far higher than even the Gaza health ministry claims.
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The latest Gaza health ministry count as of October 7 showed that women and children were 50.5% of the total that they counted. That already indicates that the UN is not counting a representative sample of Gaza deaths - only ones that are more likely to include women and children. It is a difference of 8,000 women and children that the UN is implying are dead compared to reality.
When you dig into the UN methodology, you can begin to see the problem.
It says:
[T]he number of killings verified by OHCHR by 2 September 2024 standing at 8,119 Palestinians in Gaza, including 2,036 women and 3,588 children (1,865 boys and 1,723 girls). Of these verified figures, 7,607 were killed in residential buildings or similar housing, out of which 44 per cent were children, 26 per cent women and 30 per cent men.
The footnote describes the methodology used:
That a large proportion of the fatalities verified by OHCHR were killed in residential buildings or similar housing is also partly explained by OHCHR’s verification methodology, which requires at least three independent sources, and the challenges in collecting and verifying information of killings in other circumstances.
The UN is only counting deaths that they can verify with three independent sources. The vast majority of Hamas members killed will not be verified by three sources, because Hamas is hiding its casualties. So the remainder that are far less likely to be Hamas are counted as if they represent all of Gaza!
And this is the reason that such a high percentage of those counted by the UN were killed in residential buildings. Those areas are public and Hamas cannot block people from witnessing the deaths, as opposed to in urban areas already cleared of civilians and tunnels, which is where most of the fighting is happening.
But, the UN asks, why are such a high percentage of people killed in buildings women and children? And the answer is because most of them are human shields!
We know that Israel warns residents before bombing their buildings - when they can. But if the target is a high ranking terrorist, they cannot issue a warning because then the terrorist will get away.
During the 2004 war, I counted 108 children who were killed while in the proximity of 24 known terrorists who were killed along with them. B'Tselem would usually (but not always) mention when women and children were killed along with terrorists who were the actual targets.
One major example was the Abu Jame family, 24 members of whom were killed because a top Hamas commander in Khan Younis named Ahmad Sahmoud was using them as human shields.
In other cases, it was a family member who was the Hamas terrorist.
The point is that when Israel has to go after major terrorists hiding in residential areas, while it has to perform a proportionality calculation, chances are there will be multiple innocent deaths along with the terrorist. Those situations would make the percentage of women and children killed look far higher than in most of the fighting. The UN methodology overcounts those relatively rare scenarios - 8,000 out of 40,000 deaths counted by the MoH. In the case of these 108 children killed in 2014, the UN would say that over 80% of those killed in those incidents were women and children. It is true - and the entire reason is because of Hamas war crimes of using human shields.
But the people quoting this report, like EU foreign policy head Josep Borrell, don't look past the headline. They, like the BBC, simply parrot the lie that 70% of those killed in Gaza are women and children, ignoring the evidence from Hamas itself that these numbers are nowhere close to true.
That eagerness to inflate Gaza casualty figures and the reticence to look beyond those numbers is simply another form of antisemitism.
(h/t Mark Zlochin)
