The Death Toll in Gaza Still More Than 35 Thousand Even Though the Data Has Been Revised, Not All Have Been Identified

The death toll from the Israeli attack on Gaza (Wikimedia Commons/Fars Media Corporation/Saleh Najm and Anas Sharif)

JAKARTA - The United Nations on Monday clarified that the overall death toll in Gaza calculated by the Ministry of Health in Gaza remained unchanged, at more than 35,000, since war broke out between Israel and Hamas last October.

The clarification came after the UN humanitarian agency OCHA (UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs) published a report on May 8 with revised data regarding the number of Palestinian casualties in the war.

The UN agency reduced the number of women and children believed to have died in the war by nearly half in the report. The reduction comes as the UN said it was now preferring to use the number of dead women and children whose names and other identifying details had been fully documented, rather than the total number of women and children killed.

UN spokesman Farhan Haq said the ministry's figures, which the UN regularly cites in its reports on the seven-month conflict, now reflect 24,686 deaths of "fully identified persons."

"There are about 10,000 more bodies that have yet to be fully identified, and then their details, which are children, which are women, will be determined later after the full identification process is complete," Haq told reporters in New York, reported by Reuters, May 14.

Haq explained that the figures he mentioned were bodies that had been identified in detail, 7,797 children, 4,959 women, 1,924 elderly and 10,006 men.

"The Ministry of Health said that the documentation process to fully identify the victim's details is ongoing," he added.

Haq said the UN team in Gaza could not independently verify the Gaza Ministry of Health's figures, given the ongoing war and the large number of casualties.

"Unfortunately, we have had the sad experience of coordinating with the Ministry of Health on casualty figures every few years for large mass casualty incidents in Gaza, and in the past these figures have proven to be generally accurate," Haq said.

Meanwhile, two officials from the Palestinian Ministry of Health told CNN that although the ministry separated the death toll for identified and unidentified individuals, the total number of people killed remained unchanged.

Previously, Israel last week questioned why the death rate for women and children had suddenly halved.

Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Oren Marmorstein on Monday accused the Hamas group of manipulating the figures, saying: "The figures are inaccurate and do not reflect the reality on the ground."

"Imitating Hamas propaganda messages without using any verification process has repeatedly been proven to be methodologically flawed and unprofessional," he said in a post on social media.

Separately, World Health Organization (WHO) spokesperson Margaret Harris said her party "has long-term cooperation with the Ministry of Health in Gaza and we can attest that the Ministry of Health has good capacity in data collection/analysis and previous reporting is considered credible.

"The actual number could be even higher," he said.

Both UN and US officials previously considered the figures from the Ministry of Health in Gaza to be reliable.