The United Nations' humanitarian office said on Monday that a recent change in its tally of women and children killed in Gaza was based on an update from the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, and only includes people who have been identified.
Last week, the United Nations Coordinator for Humanitarian Affairs abruptly released a death toll showing figures for women and children to be half as high as a few days before.
The UN said on Monday that the figures had earlier been based on a breakdown by the Hamas-run Information Ministry, with the updated number coming from a revised breakdown by Hamas' Health Ministry provided to the UN late last month. It says the number of total dead, around 35,000, remains the same.
OCHA's report for May 6, which uses figures from Hamas' Information Ministry, says that some 9,500 women and 14,500 children have been killed in the war. In its May 8 report, it cites the Health Ministry and says 4,959 women and 7,797 children have been killed. It added that there were still 10,000 deaths not included in the breakdown because there were insufficient details.
UN spokesperson Farhan Haq said on Monday that the Hamas-run Health Ministry's figures – cited regularly by the UN in its reporting – now reflected a breakdown of the 24,686 deaths of "people who have been fully identified."
"There's about another 10,000 plus bodies who still have to be fully identified, and so then the details of those – which of those are children, which of those are women – that will be re-established once the full identification process is complete," Haq told reporters in New York.
According to a UN report released on Monday, the Health Ministry in Gaza reported that, as of April 30, it had identified 24,686 out of 34,622 reported deaths in Gaza, including 7,797 children, 4,959 women, 1,924 elderly people, and 10,006 men.
In all previous reports by the UN, the tallies were attributed to authorities in Gaza, with a note that UN personnel in Gaza were unable to independently verify the count because of the war.
On Friday, a spokesman for UN Secretary-General Antionio Guterres said that "We get numbers from different sources on the ground, and then we try to crosscheck them ... Once a conflict is done, we'll have the most accurate figures. But we're just going with what we can absolutely confirm, which will always be the low end of what the numbers are."
