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Saturday, April 18, 2026
Expert identifies major holes in UN report claiming 38,000 women and girls were killed in Gaza war
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An American policy analyst identifies what he says are major holes in a report published Friday by the UN Women’s agency, which claimed that 38,000 women and girls were killed in Gaza by the end of 2025 and that a projected 120,000 were killed in total.
These projected figures are far above the death toll currently reported by the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health, which stands at 72,345 as of April 16.
Israel Policy Forum senior policy associate Gabriel Epstein tells The Times of Israel that the UN agency’s 38,000 figure was derived by blindly applying projections regarding both an overall claimed undercount and the gender and age breakdown from studies conducted earlier in the war, rather than using actual and current Health Ministry data.
Both the 41% undercount that UN Women assumed and the proportions the agency used to pull out girls from the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry’s child category and for adult women from the elderly category are inexplicably from a study relying on a much less complete June 2024 dataset, not current figures published in November 2025, Epstein points out.
Moreover, the UN agency then took those old figures and applied them to the more up-to-date statistics.
The Gaza health ministry’s own breakdown from November 2025 says 40.8% of the children killed were girls, while the UN agency report claims it is 44.6%.
For elderly women, too, the UN report’s percentage was higher than the more updated information provided by the Gaza health ministry — 39.9% compared to 37.2%.
“The current proportions were easily accessible from the November 2025 dataset, so this is a serious error,” Epstein says.
November 2025 Gaza health ministry data says 8,423 girls between the ages of 0 and 17 have been killed; 10,620 women between the ages of 18 and 59; and 1,820 elderly women above the age of 60, totaling 20,863 female deaths.
This would make up 30.32 percent of the 68,420 deaths on the health ministry’s unique death list.
The projections pushed by UN Women would then imply 18,000 uncounted deaths of women and girls alone. However, local Hamas-run agencies in Gaza currently estimate roughly 3,500 missing persons and some 8,000 unrecovered bodies, or 11,500 total, including men and boys. These estimations are irreconcilable with UN Women’s assumptions about the overall death toll or for women and girls specifically, Epstein says.
“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 says.
The Times of Israel Community.