Behind the Headlines: The Battle for Justice through Statistics
by sailforchange | July 8, 2025 | UA at SAIL Blogs
Maria Hussein
Amid the chaos of the conflict in Gaza, another battle quietly unfolds in the shadows; a struggle shaped by contested truths and disputed numbers, where every statistic carries the weight of a life and the burden of a narrative.
Death doesn’t just happen there; it is also recorded, questioned, and featured in news reports. Everyone becomes a statistic. Each statistic turns into a story. Additionally, somewhere along the line; noise, strategy, and suspicion could obscure the truth.
As the world observes Gaza through fragmented reports and broken lives, the question of how many people have died has been proposed. And when the numbers are all that’s left, the battle over them gets as intense as the conflict on the ground.
The Statistical Skepticism: Searching for Inflation in a Warzone
A team of researchers tried to calculate potential inflation in Gaza’s reported death toll by comparing data from the Ministry of Health with death reports from the UNRWA, the UN agency closely embedded within the Gazan population [1][2].
The formula for the actual number of deaths in the general population is:
where:
There is no inflation in the reported deaths if δ=0 , i.e.,
They assumed that everyone had the same chance of dying, including civilians and UN employees. Although it was a risky oversimplification, it served as the foundation for their statistical modeling.
Eventually, they focused on a single demographic: female UNRWA employees between the ages of 18 and 59. They discovered that deaths might be up to 64% higher than expected; 1,177 additional deaths. Could this be a sign of inflated data?
Perhaps. But the study quickly restrained its claims, stressing that the chaos of war makes reliable data hard to come by. No direct accusations, it clarified. Just a call for better, more independent reporting in the future.
It was a clinical, detached approach; one that left more questions than answers. The numbers were treated like pieces on a chessboard, not like stories.
Beyond the Accusations: What the Data from Gaza Really Shows
During October and November 2023, Gaza was subjected to continuous bombardment, with schools, hospitals, and residential areas repeatedly targeted. As the world demanded clarity, Gaza’s Ministry of Health was accused of exaggerating the number of deaths as the world demanded to know.
But that accusation, as the evidence unfolds, doesn’t hold up.
The patterns reported by Gaza’s MoH and UNRWA are nearly the same: both organizations noted concurrent increases in fatalities on October 26, one of the extreme days of the conflict [4][5]. These figures weren’t created in the shadow of politics. The two entities shared reality as they watched the same horror from separate desks.
As a matter of fact, UNRWA staff died at a higher rate than the general population, despite living under similar conditions [3].
If the MoH had inflated figures, you’d expect the reverse. Instead, this comparison reinforces the authenticity – perhaps even conservativeness – of the reported toll.
Under normal conditions, Gaza sees about 13 deaths per day. But during the strike, that soared to over 300 daily deaths. A terrifying surge caused not only by bombs but also by the collapse of medical care, power, and communication. Victims went missing under rubble. Many were never even counted.
The Narrative War: Why Underreporting Can Be Strategic
However, not every analyst is persuaded. Gabriel Epstein made the opposite argument in a 2024 article, arguing that the MoH may have minimized the number of adult male deaths rather than exaggerating them.
Adult men accounted for more than one-third of recorded fatalities prior to Israel’s ground invasion on October 27. After that, that number fell to just 17%.
According to Epstein, this is a calculated strategy meant to garner international sympathy by portraying the conflict as a one-sided slaughter of civilians. He highlights data gaps, particularly from northern Gaza, and brings up the contentious Al-Ahli hospital explosion, which he believes damaged the MoH’s reputation [6].
He also notes that by December 31, even the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) had stopped publishing full death breakdowns; a signal, he suggests, that even international bodies were growing wary.
In response, it’s important to note that data gaps are inevitable in a war zone; they are not evidence of manipulation. In fact, up to 25% of reported deaths came from media sources; a necessary fallback as official channels crumbled [7].
References:
1) Zlochin, M. (2024). The numbers of dead in Gaza don’t add up – and there is no easy explanation. Sunday Telegraph, 28 March 2024. Retrieved from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/terror-and-security/unrwa-staffdeath-toll-gaza-israel-hamas-war-data/
2) Huynh, B.Q., Chin, E.T., & Spiegel, P.B. (2024). No evidence of inflated mortality reporting from the Gaza Ministry of Health. The Lancet, 403(10421), 23-24.
3) Khatib, R., McKee, M., & Yusuf, S. (2024). Counting the dead in Gaza: Difficult but essential. The Lancet, 404(10449), 237-238.
4) UNRWA. (2024). Situation Reports on Gaza. Retrieved from https://www.unrwa.org/resources/reports
5) UNRWA. (2024). Situation Report #66. Retrieved from https://www.unrwa.org/resources/reports/unrwa-situation-report-66-situation-gaza-strip
6) Epstein, G. (2024). How Hamas manipulates Gaza fatality numbers: Examining the male undercount and other problems. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Policy Notes 144.
7) PBS NewsHour. (2023). How does the Gaza Health Ministry calculate the death toll? Retrieved from https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/how-does-the-gaza-health-ministry-calculate-the-death-toll
ِAbout the Author:
Maria Hussein is a Student of Computer Science at the American University of Beirut