What do the Gaza Health Ministry's fatality lists record about women and children?

The Gaza Health Ministry’s casualty list records, for every single person killed in Gaza, their full name, age, gender and ID number — an individual-level, verified casualty data record showing roughly 30 percent women and girls and more than 20,000 children killed, including over a thousand infants who died before their first birthday (Haaretz¹). So how many women and children? The ministry’s own list gives the totals.

The age and gender breakdown, and how reliable the data is

Independent researchers who examined all 2,000-plus pages of the ministry’s fatality records found errors of only about one percent, and the U.N., which cross-checked the ministry’s figures in past wars and found them “generally accurate,” stands by the totals. The lists don’t separate civilians from combatants, but since women, young children and the elderly are by definition unlikely fighters, they remain the best measure of civilian harm — and likely an undercount, excluding bodies still under rubble (Haaretz¹).

The “halved” claim, debunked

Israel’s foreign minister claimed the U.N. “halved” the women-and-children death count. False: the U.N. simply quoted that share among the 70 percent of victims fully identified so far — still about 52 percent, based on verified names and statistics (NPR², WHYY³). Netanyahu’s rival figure of 14,000 combatants came with no documentation (OPB⁴).