United Nations agency not only failed to critically assess Hamas figures, it inflated them even further in some cases, expert says.
By World Israel News Staff
A United Nations report claiming that more than 120,000 people died in Gaza during the war between Hamas and Israel, including more than 38,000 women and girls, is being challenged as misleading and suffering from serious methodological flaws, with one analyst noting that the figures cited collapse under scrutiny when measured even against Hamas’ own data.
The latter figure, circulated in recent media coverage of a UN Women report, was presented as evidence that women and girls made up an exceptionally large share of Gaza war fatalities, suggesting a high proportion of civilian casualties.
But Gabriel Epstein, a senior policy associate at Israel Policy Forum, told The Times of Israel over the weekend that the number was produced by “blindly applying projections” from much earlier in the war rather than using the more complete demographic breakdown published by Gaza’s Health Ministry in November 2025.
While the figures provided by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry have been widely challenged, the UN Women report not only failed to attempt to verify the ministry’s casualty figures, Epstein noted, but in some cases even exaggerated them further.
According to Epstein’s analysis, the November 2025 Gaza Health Ministry “unique death list” recorded 8,423 girls aged 0 to 17, 10,620 women aged 18 to 59, and 1,820 women over 60 killed in the war, for a combined female total of 20,863.
That amounts to roughly 30.3% of the 68,420 deaths listed in that dataset, far below the UN Women figure cited in recent reporting.
Epstein said the UN estimate appears to rely on a 41% undercount assumption and on gender-age ratios drawn from a June 2024 study, then projects those assumptions forward onto later overall death totals.
“The current proportions were easily accessible from the November 2025 dataset, so this is a serious error,” he told The Times of Israel.
The UN report, Epstein says, is not merely imprecise, but appears to have been drafted by intentionally ignoring available data and instead relying on grossly outdated projections.
Reuters, which reported the UN Women claim, said the agency asserted that an average of at least 47 women and girls were killed each day during the war and quoted UN Women humanitarian action chief Sofia Calltorp as saying, “Women and girls accounted for a proportion of deaths far higher than those observed in previous conflicts in Gaza.”
But the Reuters report did not address the methodological critique or explain the discrepancy between the 38,000 estimate and the more recent demographic listing from Gaza’s own health authorities.
Epstein argued that the UN figure also implies a much larger pool of uncounted female deaths than other available estimates of missing persons or unrecovered bodies would support.
“Basically, this is a projection on top of a projection that mixes data and assumptions from different time periods and relies on a number of unsupported assumptions to arrive at a result that is not matched either by the existing ground data or plausible assessments of uncounted deaths in Gaza,” he said.
