One of the ongoing arguments about the war in Gaza has been over the reliability of the casualty figures which are routinely updated by the Gaza Health Ministry, an organization under the control of Hamas. Israel has repeatedly questioned those numbers and has argued that a far greater percentage of the death tool is made up of Hamas militants.
Today there are reports that the United Nations has quietly revised its casualty estimates in the last week, cutting the number of women and children killed in the conflict almost in half.
According to an infographic published in OCHA’s daily report on May 6, the number of women killed in the fighting was said to be 9,500, while the organization, which admits to relying on figures from the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza, claimed that 14,500 children had been killed since the war began on Oct. 7.
Two days later, in its May 8 report,…
