Opinion

Here’s the real problem with the U.N.’s revised Gaza death toll

Gabriel Epstein is a research assistant in the Washington Institute’s Koret Project on Arab-Israel Relations.

The United Nations recently roiled discussions of the Gaza death toll when the organization altered the way it cites reporting on those killed in Israel’s counterattack against Hamas. The number of women and children killed, in the tally offered by the United Nations, suddenly dropped by nearly half, even as the overall death toll was almost unchanged. Yet the revision was neither a stunning rollback, as some claimed, nor an inconsequential shift, as others insisted.