Expert identifies major holes in U.N. report claiming 38,00 women and girls were killed in Gaza war

"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 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."