UN: At least 56 percent of those killed in Gaza are women and children

(Patria) - Women and children make up at least 56 percent of the thousands killed in the Gaza war, the United Nations said on Tuesday, AFP reported.

The United Nations is clarifying a new breakdown of the death toll in Gaza, after Israel denounced the world body as a "parrot... of Hamas propaganda messages".

"Anyone who relies on the false data of a terrorist organization to promote a blood libel against Israel is an antisemite and supports terrorism," Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz said on X late Monday.

Due to lack of access, UN agencies have relied on numbers provided by the Hamas-run Ministry of Health since the start of the war in Gaza on October 7. This has drawn criticism from Israel, but the UN says the pre-war data was reliable and it will strive to verify the figures "when conditions permit".

The ministry said on Tuesday that at least 35,173 people have been killed in the territory by Israeli military operations since the outbreak of the war. The war was triggered by Hamas's October 7 attack on Israel, which resulted in the deaths of more than 1,170 people, mostly civilians.

Gaza authorities consistently state that women and children constitute the vast majority of those killed in the Palestinian
territory. But a new breakdown provided by the health ministry and released by the UN last week appears to cast doubt on that claim.

The ministry said that as of April 30, nearly 25,000 of the dead had been fully identified, while identification elements were missing for the remaining nearly 10,000 others who had died.

Of those fully identified, it stated that 40 percent were men, 20 percent women, and 32 percent children, while eight percent were elderly – a category not broken down by gender. World Health Organization spokesperson Christian Lindmeier said on Tuesday that the new breakdown was the "most comprehensive" to date. He told reporters in Geneva that by applying the same ratio to the unidentified individuals and assuming women make up half of the elderly, it can be expected that at least "56 percent women and children" are among the more than 35,000 dead.

And that did not take into account the likelihood that more women and children are likely to be among the thousands believed to be still under the rubble "because they are the ones who usually stay at home," he said. So, from a "minimal statistical calculation," he said, "you arrive at 60 percent women and children."

Jens Laerke, a spokesperson for the UN's humanitarian agency OCHA, said the new breakdown did not contradict previous estimates that women and children made up more than two-thirds of those killed. What the health ministry had now provided was simply "more detail on a sub-category of the total 35,000 deaths," he said. "This is not mutually exclusive."