Lies, Damn Lies, and UN-Washed Hamas Propaganda Statistics

As the world press and sundry leaders have all noted that the death toll in Gaza has allegedly exceeded 50,000 people, it is important to take a minute to unpack that statistic.

Since most people are hesitant to say that they are directly quoting the figures released by Hamas, the genocidal terrorist organization that planned, led, and executed the October 7, 2023, massacre, the statistic most widely referred to is that released by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA).

According to the March 25, 2025, update¹ from UN OCHA, 50,144 Gazans have been killed since the start of the war and another 113,704 have been injured.

While shying away from directly quoting Hamas, what most people fail to acknowledge is that the source of UN OCHA’s information, as the asterisk symbol indicates, is the “MoH Gaza” – i.e. the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza. Similarly, while relying on the bottom line of the figures presented by UN OCHA, no one bothers to note the disclaimer included on UN OCHA’s website which clearly states:

Figures that are yet-to-be verified by the UN are attributed to their source. Casualty numbers have been provided by the Ministry of Health (MoH) and the Israeli authorities. The fatality breakdowns currently cited are those that the MoH in Gaza has fully identified as of 22 March 2025 out of the higher number of casualties they report.

In other words, anyone quoting OCHA-oPt is actually quoting the propaganda statistics issued by Hamas.

Analyzing the Hamas-UN-Washed Data

A close inspection of the Hamas-UN data clearly shows the efforts invested in engineering a specific narrative to tell a specific lie.

The “70 Percent Rule”

From the start of the war, one of the clear themes of the Hamas-UN statistics was to maintain, at all costs, the rule that the number of women and children killed was constantly about 70 percent. This rule was maintained even to the extent of absurdity.

Thus, for example, on December 8, 2023, UN OCHA reported² 17,487 casualties, of whom 5,153 were women, and 7,729 were children, together compromising 70 percent of the casualties.

Two and a half weeks later, on December 27, 2023, while UN OCHA reported³ that the total death toll had risen to 21,110, the number of women and children killed did not change. Incredibly, while the total number of deaths had risen, and while the number of women and children allegedly killed remained constant, the percentage of women and children killed also remained steady at 70%.

In reality, when combined, the figures of the allegedly dead women and children on December 8 account for 73.6% of the dead, while on December 27, they account for only 61% of the allegedly dead.

The Numbers Just Don’t Add Up

Having made the decision to blindly adopt and UN-wash the Hamas propaganda statistics, UN OCHA even reported the blatant lies presented by Hamas.

Thus, for example, on March 29, 2024, UN OCHA reported⁴ a total of 32,623 Palestinian casualties, of whom at least 9,000 were women and 13,000 were children.

A week later, on April 5, 2024, UN OCHA reported⁵ that the death toll had risen to a total of 33,091, of whom more than 9,500 were women (a rise of 500 dead women) and approximately 14,500 were children (a rise of roughly 1,500 dead children).

In other words, inexplicably, out of the 468 total additional deaths from March 29 to April 5, at least 2,000 (!) of them were women and children.

Hamas Embarrasses OCHA-oPt

Following the pattern of adopting and UN-washing the Hamas terror propaganda, on May 6, 2024, the UN OCHA report⁶ included its usual info-graph showing that since the beginning of the war, there had been 34,735 reported Palestinian casualties, of whom more than 9,500 (27.3%) were women and more than 14,500 (41.7%) were children.

While the UN OCHA statistics never suggested a hint of fallibility, suddenly, on May 8, 2024, UN OCHA dropped a bombshell. In its new report,⁷ UN OCHA suddenly clarified that of the total alleged casualties, only 24,686 had been identified. The number of women killed suddenly plummeted from over 9,000 on May 6 to 4,959 on May 8. The number of children killed also plummeted from over 14,500 on May 6 to 7,797 on May 8.

Shamefully, UN OCHA’s “Flash Update”⁸ for May 8 continued to cite the higher, unverified death toll without even adding a hint of clarification regarding the actually identified deaths.

While UN OCHA had previously maintained the 70 percent rule mentioned above – used to insinuate that Israel was disproportionately targeting Palestinian women and children – the new statistics presented an entirely different reality, in which the percentage of women and children killed is still high in comparison to previous conflicts with the terrorists in Gaza, but has nonetheless been reduced significantly.

So Why Did OCHA Update the Statistics?

While some may have argued that the updated statistics are a reflection of a genuine concerted UN effort to produce independent, comprehensive, and verified casualty figures, this was not the case. In truth, the UN OCHA update was substantially late and followed a Hamas announcement⁹ on March 29, 2024, in which the terrorists admitted that they had “incomplete data” regarding over 11,000 people who it previously claimed had been killed. Women and children were almost all of the cases for which the terrorists had “incomplete data.”

Where Are All the Dead Gazans Allegedly Buried Under the Rubble?

From the start of the war through February 2025, UN OCHA’s statistics on the fatalities in Gaza consistently included an additional caveat.

Alongside the verified and unverified Hamas death toll, UN OCHA’s reports added that there was an additional number of Gazans “reported missing under the rubble.” That number grew gradually throughout the period, and according to the UN OCHA report¹⁰ on February 4, 2025, there were more than 10,000 people in this category:

Even before the implementation of the ceasefire, UN OCHA must have realized that this figure was problematic and it suddenly disappeared for the updates. Thus, just a week later, on February 11, 2025, UN OCHA’s report, for the first time, suddenly omitted the additional statistic:

Some of the Other Flaws in the Hamas-UN-Washed Statistics

Alongside the other difficulties, the UN OCHA-washed Hamas statistics suffered from a host of other fundamental flaws.

No Distinction Between Terrorists and Civilians

One such flaw is the fact that no reference was made in the statistics to the distinction between the deaths of terrorists/combatants versus civilians. All the deaths were merely categorized, certainly by the UN, as “men,” “women,” “children,” and the “elderly.” From the statistics provided, it is unclear what ages Hamas/UN OCHA used to categorize the alleged fatalities as “children” or “elderly.”

This omission was not incidental. While Hamas had a clear incentive to obfuscate the statistics to create a false picture, the UN omission was far more nefarious. The UN does not define Hamas or any other Palestinian terrorist organization as a terrorist organization. Accordingly, when the UN discussed Gaza before the October 7, 2023, massacre, it did not refer to Hamas as terrorists but rather as the de facto authorities in Gaza. And accordingly, the UN refuses to acknowledge that Hamas terrorists are legitimate military targets. Instead, the UN sees them as innocent civilians.

An additional problem is that the UN statistics included all “reported casualties.” While IDF publications¹¹ showed that a considerable percentage of the rockets fired by the terrorists fell in the Gaza Strip, the UN statistics made no distinction and gave no account of Gazans killed by the terrorists’ errant fire.

Thus, for example, on October 18, 2023, the UN OCHA daily update dramatically reported,¹² “On the evening of 17 October, 471 people, including children, health care staff, and Internally Displaced People (IDPs), were killed in an explosion at Al Ahli Arab/Baptist hospital in Gaza city, according to the latest figures from the Ministry of Health in Gaza. This was the deadliest incident in Gaza since hostilities escalated.”

A few days later, Hamas, responding to scepticism regarding the death toll, released a 212-page document¹³ with the apparently random names, ages, and ID numbers of the dead since the beginning of the war.

Similar to UN OCHA’s claim, Hamas included its reference, graphically, to the Al-Ahli hospital incident, including a sudden sharp spike in the October 17 death toll:

Conclusively proved,¹⁴ the world now accepts that the strike on the Al-Ahli hospital was not the result of an Israeli attack but rather the product of a misfired rocket shot by terrorists from the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The death toll from the incident was less than 100 people, but neither Hamas nor UN OCHA admitted that fact. In fact, OCHA’s death toll numbers continued to climb without even a hint of a glitch.

How Many Gazans Were Killed by Hamas?

An additional flaw in the statistics is that they do not say how many Palestinians were killed by Hamas itself, whether while trying to prevent the civilians from moving from the north to the south of Gaza, while commandeering aid supplies, or simply in the course of their fighting against the IDF.

Have There Been Any Deaths from Natural Causes in Gaza?

While it may be shocking for UN OCHA to accept, since the start of the war, Gazans have continued to die from natural causes. Since Hamas clearly has no interest to provide the number of Gazans who died simply from natural causes, accordingly their deaths are completely ignored in the UN OCHA statistics. As already noted by the JCFA¹⁵ in a previous analysis of the Gazan death toll, according to the CIA’s statistics, an estimated 15-16 Gazans die every day from natural causes. Accordingly, on average, during the 544 days from October 7, 2023, through April 2, 2024, an estimated 8,160 people died in Gaza of natural causes.

The Bottom Line

While the list of discrepancies, flaws, and blatant lies presented by UN OCHA can fill many more pages, the above examples provide quick insight as to why UN OCHA statistics should never be given any credibility.

The truth of the matter is that while the UN OCHA statistics enjoy the halo effect of being presented as legitimate UN figures, they are not, and never have been UN figures. Rather, they were always and remain merely a UN regurgitation of the Hamas statistics and should be treated as such.

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