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Hamas and Israel, including more than 38,000 women and girls, is being exposed as statistically indefensible, built on outdated projections stacked on top of each other, and contradicted by the very Hamas data it purports to represent.

Gabriel Epstein, a senior policy associate at the Israel Policy Forum, told The Times of Israel that the UN Women figure 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. The result, he says, is not a measurement of reality but a mathematical fiction.

The UN Women report claimed that an average of 47 women and girls were killed each day throughout the war, and UN Women humanitarian action chief Sofia Calltorp asserted that “Women and girls accounted for a proportion of deaths far higher than those observed in previous conflicts in Gaza.” Reuters published these figures without addressing methodological critiques or explaining the gap between the UN estimate and Hamas’s own data.

That gap is enormous. The Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry’s November 2025 “unique death list” recorded 8,423 girls between ages 0 and 17, 10,620 women between 18 and 59, and 1,820 elderly women above 60, a combined female total of 20,863. That figure represents 30.3% of the 68,420 deaths listed in the dataset. The UN Women report put women and girls at 38,000, nearly double.

The discrepancy stems from a methodology that Epstein describes as inexplicable. The UN Women agency applied a 41% undercount assumption and used gender-age ratios from a June 2024 study, then projected those figures onto later, more complete datasets, ignoring the far more current November 2025 breakdown that was readily available. The Gaza Health Ministry’s own November 2025 data shows that 40.8% of child fatalities were girls. UN Women claimed the figure was 44.6%. For elderly women, the ministry reported 37.2%, while UN Women used 39.9%.

“The current proportions were easily accessible from the November 2025 dataset, so this is a serious error,” Epstein told The Times of Israel.

The implications of the UN Women figure don’t add up even when measured against Hamas’ own estimates. The 38,000 figure would imply approximately 18,000 uncounted female deaths. Yet Hamas-run agencies in Gaza currently estimate roughly 3,500 missing persons and some 8,000 unrecovered bodies, which amount to 11,500 total, for men and boys included. Those numbers are flatly irreconcilable with what UN Women is claiming.

“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,” Epstein said.

The projected 120,000 total death toll cited by UN Women stands even further from current reality. The Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health’s own figure, as of April 16, 2026, stands at 72,345, meaning the UN Women projection exceeds even Hamas’s inflated claims by nearly 50,000 deaths.

A Pattern of Fabrication

This is not the first time Gaza casualty figures have been manipulated. The problems run far deeper than sloppy methodology.

In April 2025, HonestReporting published a report revealing that at least 3,400 previously “identified” deaths, including more than 1,000 children Hamas had claimed were killed in Israeli airstrikes, were quietly deleted from the terrorist organization’s most recent fatality list. The erasure went largely unreported by the international press.

Salo Aizenberg, who serves on HonestReporting’s Board of Directors, compared fatality lists released by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry in August and October 2024 with a revised version issued in March 2025. What he found was damning. Among all fatalities recorded between the ages of 13 and 55, the general combat age range, 72% were male. “Hamas has falsified fatality data in past wars,” Aizenberg wrote, adding that the data “supports the IDF’s own assessments and underscores the fact that Israel has been conducting targeted strikes against militant operatives.”

HonestReporting’s research also determined that approximately 10,000 individuals on the ministry’s lists likely died from natural causes or incidents entirely unrelated to the war.

Andrew Fox, a researcher at the Henry Jackson Society and former British paratrooper who has worked alongside Aizenberg, was unsparing in his assessment. “The lists are so unreliable that the world’s media shouldn’t be quoting them as reliable,” he said. The reason the lists are so easy to manipulate is structural: Hamas compiles its fatality data using public Google forms, meaning anyone with the link can submit a name with zero verification. “They’ve been accepting names onto that list with no evidence at all,” Fox said. “Now, they’re clearly trying to backpedal and delete the ones they can’t substantiate.”

The Henry Jackson Society published its own report in November 2024, cataloguing specific categories of manipulation in the Gaza Health Ministry numbers: men listed as women to inflate female fatality figures, adults registered as children, and natural deaths folded into war casualty counts, estimated at roughly 5,000 per year. The report also flagged the disproportionate number of deaths among fighting-age men, consistent with IDF assessments that approximately 17,000 Hamas terrorists have been killed in the fighting. “Data analysis indicates that proportionally most fatalities are men aged 15–45, contradicting claims that civilian populations are being disproportionately targeted,” the report concluded.

Even the United Nations has been forced, under pressure, to revise its own figures. In March 2024, UNICEF stated that 13,450 children had been killed in Gaza, citing Hamas Health Ministry data. Two months later, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs updated the figure to 7,797, which is a 42% reduction. The estimated number of women casualties was simultaneously revised from over 9,500 to fewer than 5,000. The UN attributed the revision to “the fog of war.” The more accurate explanation is that for months, it had been publishing Hamas propaganda as verified fact.

Compounding the problem is how consistently international media outlets ignore context that would complicate the narrative. Research shows that only 3% of outlets cited specific figures for Hamas combatants killed, and just 15% noted that the Gaza Ministry of Health does not differentiate between militants and civilians in its reporting. As HonestReporting observed, even accepting Hamas’s own grossly inflated statistics, accusations of genocide are statistically absurd: the majority of the dead are military-age males, an estimated 8,000-plus deaths stem from natural causes, and the real combatant-to-civilian ratio likely approaches 1:1, which is significantly better than most modern military conflicts, where that ratio typically runs as high as 1:9.

The UN report on Gaza casualty figures does not merely contain errors. It presents projections built on outdated assumptions as established fact, ignores accessible and more current data, and produces a number that contradicts not only Israeli and independent assessments, but Hamas’ own tallies. The international media then amplifies those numbers without scrutiny, and governments cite them when condemning Israel.

This is not journalism. This is a conveyor belt for terrorist-generated data, and it is long past time the world’s press stopped running it.