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

(Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs) Lt.-Col. (res.) Maurice Hirsch - According to statistics released by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA), as of March 25, 2025, 50,144 Gazans have been killed since the start of the war and another 113,704 have been injured. Yet the source of UN OCHA's information is the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza. A close inspection of the data clearly shows the efforts invested in engineering a specific narrative to tell a specific lie. From the start of the war, one of the clear themes of the statistics was to maintain that the number of women and children killed was constantly about 70% - to insinuate that Israel was disproportionately targeting Palestinian women and children. One fundamental flaw is that the statistics made no distinction between the deaths of terrorists/combatants versus civilians. All the deaths were categorized by the UN as "men," "women," "children," and the "elderly." Accordingly, the UN refuses to acknowledge that Hamas terrorists are legitimate military targets. Instead, the UN sees them as innocent civilians. While IDF publications showed that a considerable percentage of the rockets fired by the terrorists fell inside Gaza, the UN statistics made no distinction and gave no account of Gazans killed by the terrorists' errant fire. Moreover, the statistics do not say how many Palestinians were killed by Hamas itself, whether while trying to prevent civilians from moving away from the fighting, while commandeering aid supplies, or simply in the course of their fighting against the IDF. From October 7, 2023, through April 2, 2024, an estimated 8,160 people died in Gaza of natural causes. Yet their deaths are included in the UN OCHA statistics. Thus, while the UN OCHA statistics enjoy the halo effect of being presented as legitimate UN figures, they are not. Rather, they were always a regurgitation of Hamas statistics. The writer, former director of the Military Prosecution in Judea and Samaria, is director of the Palestinian Authority Accountability Initiative at the Jerusalem Center.
2025-04-03 00:00:00
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