What's Going on With Gaza's Fatality Numbers?

Inside the contested death toll: On May 6, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) at the United Nations reported that 34,735 Gazans have been killed in Israel's offensive since it began some 200-plus days ago. Those deaths include 9,500 women and 14,500 children.

On May 8, the same office substantially revised the accounting, reporting 4,959 "identified" women and 7,797 "identified" children. Per this report, some 10,000 are allegedly buried under rubble, unable to be identified.

So what accounts for this, and does this change matter?

All the numbers we're getting out of Gaza are from offices run by Hamas, the terrorist group that perpetrated the October 7 attack and runs the government (if you consider the government to be functional at all there). But there's two main sources—the Government Media Office (GMO) and the Ministry of Health (MoH)—and the first, higher count is from the GMO, whereas the revised count is from the MoH.

In order to suss out the legitimacy of the numbers, we have to consider what is being counted as "identified" vs. "unidentified." The MoH had long counted deaths reported by both hospitals and "reliable" media accounts; around the start of April, it revised the media-reported deaths to be categorized as "incomplete" and then "unidentified." When a death is reported based on a media account (and a media account alone), there are no remains that have been identified—so the accuracy of this count remains disputed.

If you think these data-reporting practices are not so great, you should look at the GMO's account. "Way back on Dec. 11, GMO reported the death of 8,000 children and 6,200 women out of 18,396 total fatalities," writes David Adesnik, the director of research for the nonpartisan Foundation for Defense of Democracies. "Arithmetic shows there were (18,396-8,000-6,200=) 4,196 men. But GMoH reported at the time that hospitals had registered 5,577 male fatalities." In other words: Hamas' two data-reporting entities cannot even line up their stories.

If you're noticing that it sure seems like the GMO inflated numbers of dead women and children, which was then parroted by the U.N.'s OCHA and the news media, you would be correct: Hamas-run government agencies seem to grasp that it's the killing of women and children that strikes international audiences as especially heinous. One thing that's tough, when looking at the adult males category, is not knowing what percentage of those deaths are civilians vs. militants; presumably, many people are viscerally opposed to any innocent civilians being harmed, but far fewer are opposed to the Israeli military attempting to avenge the October 7 deaths while also ensuring that those responsible are stamped out, so a similar massacre does not happen again.

"Over time, media reports have accounted for an ever larger share of the ministry's data," writes Adesnik for The Wall Street Journal. "Of nearly 11,000 fatalities reported between Jan. 1 and March 31, the ministry derived 77.7% from media reports. Adult males account for only 9% of fatalities attributed to the news, even though Gaza's sex ratio is close to even and more than half its residents are adults."

U.N. changed which source it looks at: All of this weedsy data-reporting information is relevant because, on May 8, OCHA revised which source it relies on for numbers, switching to the arguably more accurate MoH count. (Still, in order to preserve the topline number, OCHA maintains an asterisk footnote claiming roughly 10,000 dead people remain buried under rubble—a relic of the GMO reporting which has not been substantiated and is just quite impossible to know for sure.) But OCHA changed all of this without announcing it.

Consider, too, that even the MoH may not be especially reliable: In October, a Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) rocket that seems to have been launched from within Gaza accidentally struck a hospital; Gaza's Ministry of Health claimed that nearly 500 people were killed, and attributed the attack to Israel. U.S. intelligence sources say the actual toll was probably closer to 100 (if that high) and that the strike is attributable to PIJ, not Israel.

Other organizations, like the U.K.'s Airwars—an organization focused on civilians harmed by war—have found that the MoH lists of names do match up, generally, with those who have been reported killed. (Airwars generally gives death toll ranges, and will even assign labels for degree of confidence, coding deaths as "contested" or with "weak" evidence versus "confirmed" and "fair" evidence.)

All this matters because the extraordinarily high death toll is one of the primary justifications given for people's arguments that Israel needs to cease its offensive in the Gaza Strip.

Whether it's college students on American campuses or the Biden administration that's recently started to pause weapons shipments to Israel, there's a sense that many are souring on the Israeli cause, believing the cost in human life is simply too high for Israel to be justified in continuing its military campaign. All of this is fair and defensible, but must be based on accurate numbers.

Scenes from New York: ON A LIGHTER NOTE! Last night, all the cool people of New York (and some of the cool people of Los Angeles) were at a Reason event in SoHo, in which Nick Gillespie interviewed The Free Press' Nellie Bowles on her new book, Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches From the Wrong Side of History. 

Bowles beautifully details how half of America lost its everloving mind in the wake of George Floyd's death—the police abolitionist movement, the suppressed pandemic-lockdown rage, the explicit ideological capture of newsrooms, and the absolute racket of Race2Dinner-type seminars and "anti-racist" retreats for white women (that end up, in fact, being quite racist in the end).

My beautiful friends!

QUICK HITS

• "The Consumer Price Index climbed 3.4 percent in April, down from 3.5 percent in March, the Labor Department said Wednesday," reports The New York Times. The core index—which excludes food and gas (y'know, those negligible line items in your household budget!)—"rose 3.6 percent last month, down from 3.8 percent a month earlier."

• "All the huge automation wins have the same thing in common: they don't look anything like us," writes Pirate Wires' Mike Solana. "Successful automatons built for a specific human function—washing clothes, running blood tests, reasoning—tend to simply look the way they need to look, which tends to be weird (and in the case of robots that think, not embodied at all)."

• Luxury buildings start to provide a new amenity: IV drips.

• In China, "local state-owned enterprises would be asked to help purchase unsold homes from distressed developers at steep discounts using loans provided by state banks," reports Bloomberg. "Many of the properties would then be converted into affordable housing."

• What is happening in our doctoral programs?

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