The United Nations interim report on people killed in the Gaza Strip

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) published a report on Friday on the situation in the Gaza Strip during the first six months of Israel's invasion, i.e. between the beginning of November 2023 and the end of April 2024. During that time, UN officials were able to verify the killing of 8,119 Palestinian people, largely due to attacks by the Israeli army: almost half (44 percent) were minors, and a further 26 percent women.

There is a reason why this data differs greatly from those routinely used by the main international media, which are provided by the Gaza Strip's Ministry of Health (which is controlled by Hamas, but is still considered generally reliable ): according to the data of the ministry, to date, more than 43 thousand people have been killed in the Gaza Strip since 7 October 2023, and at the end of April, i.e. approximately in the same period considered by the report, there were more than 34 thousand .

The same United Nations report cites the figures of the Strip's Ministry of Health without denying them, and explains that the difference with its results lies in the fact that to verify a death the OHCHR staff must obtain confirmation from three different sources, such as for example a hospital medical record, a relative and the testimony of a member of the United Nations or an NGO present on site. The data from the Gaza Ministry of Health instead comes from bulletins arriving from hospitals and other sources in the field.

The director of the United Nations office for human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Ajith Sunghay, told reporters that the report's tally was provisional and that the final tally was likely to be similar to that of the Strip's health ministry: The numbers are, obviously, enormous compared to previous years, so we need time to catch up and verify."

The report states that among the 8,119 people whose killing was confirmed, the three most represented age categories are, in order: children aged 5 to 9, those aged 10 to 14 and those aged 0 to 4. The youngest person killed among those identified by the OHCHR was a one-day-old baby, while the oldest was a 97-year-old woman.

The number of women killed is almost equal to that of men. This is a change from the repeated bombings Israel conducted on the Strip in 2021 and 2014, when mainly men in their 20s and 30s were killed (although already in 2021 the number of minors killed had risen compared to 2014).

Of the more than 8,000 people killed cited by the report, 93 percent were killed while in residential or similar buildings and 88 percent died in attacks that killed more than five people. According to the report, the high number of deaths per attack "is mainly due to the fact that the Israeli army uses weapons with wide-ranging effects in densely populated areas." Some people (whose number was not quantified) may instead have been killed by missiles fired by Palestinian armed groups that did not achieve their desired objective.

In addition to the killings, the report highlights other problematic practices such as the numerous forced displacements of the Palestinian population imposed by Israel, the many attacks on hospitals carried out by its army and the killings of several journalists. It also says that UN officials were able to verify the Israeli army's use of white phosphorus munitions (a substance sometimes used in conjunction with bombings, which has toxic or incendiary effects), and the wounding of some civilians, which had already been reported by various NGOs and independent investigations. The use of white phosphorus is not always illegal under international law, but its use against civilians is .

The report once again underlines, as other United Nations bodies and representatives had done in recent months even more decisively , the possibility that Israel is carrying out acts of genocide against the Palestinian people. This can be argued on the basis of the systematic nature with which the Israeli army carries out indiscriminate attacks on the Gaza Strip, combined with "repeated statements by Israeli officials stating that the end of the conflict is conditional on the entire destruction of Gaza and the exodus of the people Palestinian". Israel is under investigation for genocide at the International Court of Justice and some of its ministers are under investigation for war crimes by the International Criminal Court.