(HorizonPost.com) – United Nations data on the civilian death toll in Gaza appeared to have been quietly adjusted between May 6 and May 8 to reflect a more realistic number.
The UN, like the American media and even some US politicians, including President Joe Biden, have unquestioningly repeated the civilian death toll supplied by the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza since Israel’s war against Hamas began last October.
In recent months, analyses of the Hamas-supplied numbers have found that the Ministry of Health had been wildly overstating the number of civilian casualties, especially the number of children.
A January report from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy found significant discrepancies in the reported death toll, likely caused by manipulation on the part of the Ministry of Health.
Another analysis of the Health Ministry’s figures published in March concluded that the numbers provided were faked, especially in the breakdown of the number of women and children Hamas claimed had been killed by Israel during the war.
Wharton School Statistics and Data Science Professor Abraham Wyner said in the March analysis that the Gaza Health Ministry’s death rate was far too uniform, which is statistically impossible in a conflict since the intensity of war is never uniform.
Despite rising concerns that the figures widely cited were fabricated, President Joe Biden cited the Hamas-led Ministry of Health’s phony numbers during his State of the Union Address in March, claiming at the time that more than 30,000 Palestinian civilians had been killed in the war.
According to the UN’s published data on May 6, the total number of civilians reportedly killed in the war stood at 34,735, including more than 9,500 women and over 14,500 children.
However, two days later, the UN radically adjusted the number of women and children killed to just 4,959 women and 7,797 children –nearly half what it originally claimed.
The May 8 figures also include the total number of confirmed deaths as of the end of April, which stood at 24,686 people. Of those, 10,006 were men and 1,924 were elderly.
By percentage, the confirmed deaths were 40 percent male, 20 percent female, and 32 percent children.
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