Lies, damn lies and ‘UN-washed’ Hamas statistics
While UN OCHA statistics on Gaza are presented as legitimate U.N. figures, they are not, and never have been.
As the world press and sundry leaders have all claimed that the death toll of Israel’s campaign against Hamas in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023 has exceeded 50,000, it is important to take a minute to unpack that figure.
Most people are hesitant to acknowledge that they are directly quoting figures released by Hamas, the genocidal terrorist organization that planned, led and executed the Oct. 7, 2023 massacre; the source most widely referred to is the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA).
According to the March 25, 2025, update from UN OCHA, 50,144 Gazans have been killed since the start of the war and another 113,704 have been injured.
What most people fail to acknowledge is that the source of UN OCHA’s information, as the asterisk symbol on the update indicates, is the “MoH Gaza”—the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry. Similarly, no one bothers to note the disclaimer included on UN OCHA’s website:
“Figures that are yet-to-be verified by the UN are attributed to their source. Casualty numbers have been provided by the Ministry of Health (MoH) and the Israeli authorities. The fatality breakdowns currently cited are those that the MoH in Gaza has fully identified as of 22 March 2025 out of the higher number of casualties they report.”
In other words, anyone quoting OCHA’s figure is actually quoting the propaganda statistics issued by Hamas.
Analyzing the data
A close inspection of the Hamas-United Nations data clearly shows the effort invested in engineering a narrative.
For example, from the start of the war, one of the clear themes of the Hamas-United Nations statistics has been the “70% rule,” namely that women and children have comprised about 70% of all casualties.
Thus, for example, on Dec. 8, 2023, UN OCHA reported 17,487 casualties, of whom 5,153 were women and 7,729 were children, together comprising 70% of the casualties.
Two and a half weeks later, on Dec. 27, 2023, while UN OCHA reported that the total death toll had risen to 21,110, the number of women and children killed had not changed. Incredibly, while the total number of deaths had risen, and while the number of women and children allegedly killed remained constant, the percentage of women and children killed also remained steady at 70%.
The numbers don’t add up
Having made the decision to blindly adopt and “UN-wash” Hamas propaganda, UN OCHA even reported blatant lies presented by Hamas.
Thus, for example, on March 29, 2024, UN OCHA reported a total of 32,623 Palestinian casualties, of whom at least 9,000 were women and 13,000 were children.
A week later, on April 5, 2024, UN OCHA reported that the death toll had risen to a total of 33,091, of whom more than 9,500 were women (a rise of 500 dead women) and approximately 14,500 were children (a rise of roughly 1,500 dead children).
In other words, inexplicably, out of the 468 total additional deaths from March 29 to April 5, at least 2,000 (!) of them were women and children.
Hamas embarrasses OCHA
On May 6, 2024, the UN OCHA report included its usual info-graph showing that since the beginning of the war there had been 34,735 reported Palestinian casualties, of whom more than 9,500 (27.3%) were women and more than 14,500 (41.7%) were children.
While the UN OCHA statistics never suggested a hint of fallibility, suddenly, on May 8, 2024, UN OCHA dropped a bombshell. In its new report, UN OCHA suddenly clarified that of the total alleged casualties, only 24,686 had been identified. The number of women killed suddenly plummeted from over 9,000 on May 6 to 4,959 on May 8. The number of children killed also plummeted from over 14,500 on May 6 to 7,797 on May 8.
Shamefully, UN OCHA’s “Flash Update” for May 8 continued to cite the higher, unverified death toll without even adding a hint of clarification regarding the actually identified deaths.
While UN OCHA had previously maintained the 70% rule mentioned above—used to insinuate that Israel was disproportionately targeting Palestinian women and children—the new statistics presented an entirely different reality, in which the percentage of women and children killed was still high in comparison to previous conflicts with the terrorists in Gaza, but nonetheless reduced significantly.
So why did OCHA update the statistics?
While some may have argued that the updated statistics were a reflection of a genuine, concerted UN effort to produce independent, comprehensive and verified casualty figures, this was not the case. In truth, the UN OCHA update was substantially late and followed a Hamas announcement on March 29, 2024, in which the terrorists admitted that they had “incomplete data” regarding over 11,000 people who it previously claimed had been killed. Women and children comprised almost all of the cases for which the terrorists had “incomplete data.”
Where are all the Gazans allegedly buried under the rubble?
From the start of the war through February 2025, UN OCHA’s statistics on the fatalities in Gaza consistently included an additional caveat.
Alongside the verified and unverified Hamas death toll, UN OCHA’s reports added that there was an additional, unknown number of Gazans “reported missing under the rubble.” That number grew gradually throughout the period, and according to the UN OCHA report on Feb. 4, 2025, there were more than 10,000 people in this category.
Even before the implementation of the ceasefire, UN OCHA must have realized that this figure was problematic, and it suddenly disappeared for the updates. Thus, just a week later, on Feb. 11, 2025, UN OCHA’s report, for the first time, suddenly omitted the additional statistic.
Some of the other flaws in the numbers
Alongside the other difficulties, the UN OCHA-washed Hamas statistics suffered from a host of other fundamental flaws.
One such flaw is the fact that no reference was made in the statistics to the distinction between terrorists/combatants and civilians. All the deaths were merely categorized, certainly by the United Nations, as “men,” “women,” “children” and the “elderly.” From the statistics provided, it is unclear what ages Hamas/UN OCHA used to categorize people as “children” or “elderly.”
An additional problem is that the UN statistics included all “reported casualties.” While IDF publications showed that a considerable percentage of the rockets fired by the terrorists fell in the Gaza Strip, the UN statistics made no distinction with regard to cause of death.
Thus, for example, on Oct. 18, 2023, the UN OCHA daily update dramatically reported that, “On the evening of 17 October, 471 people, including children, health care staff, and Internally Displaced People (IDPs), were killed in an explosion at Al Ahli Arab/Baptist hospital in Gaza city, according to the latest figures from the Ministry of Health in Gaza. This was the deadliest incident in Gaza since hostilities escalated.”
A few days later, Hamas, responding to skepticism regarding the death toll, released a 212-page document with the apparently random names, ages, and ID numbers of the dead since the beginning of the war.
Similar to UN OCHA’s claim, Hamas included its reference, graphically, to the Al-Ahli hospital incident, including a sudden sharp spike in the October 17 death toll.
The world now accepts that the strike on the Al-Ahli hospital was not the result of an Israeli attack but rather the product of a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket. The death toll from the incident was less than 100 people, but neither Hamas nor UN OCHA admitted that fact. In fact, OCHA’s death toll numbers continued to climb without even a hint of a glitch.
The figures do not state how many Palestinians were killed by Hamas itself, whether while trying to prevent the civilians from moving from the north to the south of Gaza, while commandeering aid supplies, or simply in the course of their fighting against the Israeli military.
Deaths from natural causes
While it may be shocking for UN OCHA to accept, since the start of the war, Gazans have continued to die from natural causes. Since Hamas clearly has no interest to provide the number of Gazans who died of natural causes, their deaths are completely ignored in the UN OCHA statistics. As already noted by the JCFA in a previous analysis of the Gaza death toll, according to the CIA’s statistics, an estimated 15-16 Gazans die every day from natural causes. Accordingly, on average, during the 544 days from Oct. 7, 2023, through April 2, 2024, an estimated 8,160 people died in Gaza of natural causes.
The bottom line
While the list of discrepancies, flaws and blatant lies presented by UN OCHA can fill many more pages, the above examples provide quick insight as to why UN OCHA statistics should never be given any credibility.
The truth of the matter is that while the UN OCHA statistics enjoy the halo effect of being presented as legitimate UN figures, they are not, and never have been UN figures. Rather, they were always and remain merely a UN regurgitation of Hamas statistics, and should be treated as such.
1 comment:
What? Murderers lie?
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