The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has significantly revised downward its reported casualty figures for the ongoing conflict in Gaza. In updates published on May 6th and May 8th, OCHA cut its estimate of the number of children killed from over 14,500 deaths to 7,797 deaths. It also lowered its tally of women fatalities from more than 9,500 deaths to 4,959 deaths.
The sharp reductions in OCHA’s death toll figures were first reported by The Jerusalem Post on May 11th. The newspaper noted that OCHA had previously been citing casualty numbers provided by the Hamas-controlled Government Media Office (GMO) in Gaza. However, OCHA did not specify the source for the dramatically lower fatality figures in its May 8th update.
Notably, OCHA’s revised death toll figures precisely match those contained in a May 2nd report from a different Hamas-run organization – the Gaza Ministry of Health. That report listed 7,797 children killed and 4,959 women killed in the conflict up until that point.
In early April, the Gaza Health Ministry had acknowledged “incomplete data” in being able to document over 10,000 of the deaths it had previously reported from the war. The ministry indicated at that time that it did not have names to verify more than 10,000 of the individuals it had claimed were deceased casualties.
After April 1st, the Gaza Health Ministry also stopped repeating its earlier claim that 70% of the people killed in the conflict were women and children. This statistic had been frequently cited by Hamas authorities and media offices since the first weeks of fighting. The ministry suggested the oft-repeated 70% figure may have been invented by media outlets, even as the GMO continued promoting that same figure while revising its own total death tolls upward to remain consistent with it.
While OCHA did not provide an explanation for the revised casualty data in its latest updates, the sharp reductions align with assessments questioning the credibility of the earlier, much higher death tolls claimed by Hamas authorities and affiliated groups in Gaza. Experts had repeatedly raised doubts about those figures cited by the UN, which lacked clear sourcing and evidence.
Prior to this course correction by OCHA, the organization had continually referenced the inflated Gaza government casualty statistics for over two months since the conflict began. OCHA gave no indication of why it abruptly shifted to citing figures closely aligned with the Hamas Health Ministry’s data after promoting substantially higher totals for months.
The lack of transparency around OCHA’s updated death toll numbers corresponds with the admitted gaps in documentation acknowledged by the Gaza Health Ministry itself in early April regarding thousands of alleged fatalities it could not verify with names or evidence.
By dramatically revising its estimates downward without explanation, OCHA has effectively undercut the statistics it had been amplifying up until recently. However, the delayed revision also allowed Hamas’s earlier unsubstantiated claims of over 14,500 child deaths and 9,500 women killed to remain the predominant narrative for an extended period.