A member of the U.N. Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel, said the panel did not independently verify how many Palestinians reported killed in Gaza were civilians. The statement was reported after the commission concluded in September 2025 that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza since October 2023.
In an interview reported by JNS and posted on X, commissioner Chris Sidoti was asked whether the commission had established that the people not identified as militants were civilians. Sidoti said the panel lacked the information to determine that, adding that the number of militants killed was not known to the commission or, he said, to the Israel Defense Forces.
The commission’s report cited a Guardian article stating that 83% of Gazans killed in the conflict were civilians. The material provided does not include a response from the commission explaining how Sidoti’s remarks affect that figure or the report’s broader conclusions.
Newly released Palestinian Ministry of Health statistics cover deaths and births registered in Gaza during 2025. The ministry counted 24,650 deaths: 18,085 males and 6,565 females. It attributed 17,286 deaths, or 70.1%, to direct targeting in the war. The same report recorded 50,227 live births. The figures are the first update since 2022 to include non-violent deaths, according to the source report.
The birth and death totals do not by themselves establish the territory’s net population change. Israel Policy Forum policy associate Gabriel Epstein said migration into and out of Gaza makes the actual population-growth rate difficult to determine. He also said it would be unsurprising for Gaza’s population to grow given its relatively young age profile. Epstein argued that a negative growth rate in 2025 would require substantially more deaths than those recorded, but the source material does not provide an independent population estimate.
Elliot Malin, president of Stratos Council, said the number of recorded births compared with deaths weighs against the claim that Israel intended to destroy a substantial part of Gaza’s population. Malin also challenged the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification’s 2025 famine assessment, arguing that the reported figures suggested the population had enough food to sustain itself. Andrew Fox, a senior associate fellow at the Henry Jackson Society, likewise said the data showed there was no famine.
Those assessments are disputed and should not be treated as independent findings established by the mortality and birth figures alone. The IPC did not respond to questions from Fox News Digital about whether the new information affected its earlier famine declaration. The source material also does not provide an independent review of the ministry’s full data or a separate accounting of deaths from hunger.
Epstein said the ministry’s latest figures undercut estimates from outside organizations that the Gaza death toll was much higher because of uncounted non-violent deaths. He also said the figures supported an effort by the ministry to account for deaths, while noting that its report does not identify how many of the dead were members of armed groups. The ministry attributed the greater number of male deaths mainly to direct targeting of working-age men during military operations.
An IDF spokesperson said Israeli forces target military objectives and people involved in terrorist organizations or hostilities, not civilians on the basis of age or gender. The spokesperson said the military takes feasible precautions to reduce civilian harm and follows a targeting framework intended to identify lawful military objectives. Epstein also said the higher number of male deaths did not, by itself, show that men were targeted because of their age or sex, arguing that armed groups predominantly draw from that demographic.
The Palestinian Ministry of Health did not respond to requests for comment by the report’s publication time. The competing claims about the commission’s genocide finding, civilian casualties, and famine remain consequential and contested; the figures described here do not independently settle those disputes.
