A coordinator, not a coroner
Ramiz Alakbarov addressed the Security Council on 15 October 2026 as Acting Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process. UNSCO is a political office. It does not run a morgue and it does not try targeting cases. The meetings coverage issued as SC/16478 records him converting a Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health total into the effect of Israeli operations: they “continue, causing” a rounded fatality figure. That verb is the trick. A briefing line is being asked to do the work of a forensic finding.
A Hamas total is not a census
He sourced “some 1,500” deaths, “including more than 320 children and 140 women,” to “the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza.” The Foundation for Defense of Democracies records that after Hamas seized Gaza in 2007 it ran that ministry as part of its parallel government, that “the ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in its count,” and that the figures “do not identify the circumstances of death.” Without those two splits, “causing” assigns every listed death to Israeli fire, and the women-and-children slice is then treated as a civilian remainder. Neither move is a medical examiner’s conclusion.
The Jerusalem Post reported that researchers reviewing Hamas-run Health Ministry statistics found men listed as women, adults registered as children, natural deaths folded into war totals, and no combatant-civilian break. In July 2026 the paper reported that the IDF had already killed at least around 420 Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists since the October 2025 ceasefire, and that Hamas had killed dozens of Gazans while reasserting control. By early October the same ministry was claiming at least 1,400 killed since the ceasefire and still, the Post noted, “does not disclose terrorist casualties.” Israel said the strikes targeted Hamas operatives trying to attack and rearm. “Some 1,500” is a Hamas dashboard with a UN accent. It is not a classified list of who died, how, or at whose hands.
The war he left off the ledger
The war opened on 7 October 2023, when Hamas-led terrorists murdered about 1,200 people and abducted 251, as the IDF records. The Council met, the UN coverage notes, shortly after the third anniversary of that massacre. In the same chamber the meetings coverage records Israel’s representative stating that the Council still had not designated Hamas a terrorist organization and that Hamas was still terrorizing people in Gaza. Alakbarov’s sentence does not name the Islamist terror regime that started the war, still runs Gaza’s ministries, and still refuses to disarm. He did not mention that five Israeli soldiers have been killed since the ceasefire, as IDF figures reported by the Jerusalem Post. He treated a Hamas count as the measure of Israeli self-defense and left the authors of the war unnamed.
He used a Hamas health-ministry dashboard as a substitute for a census and a finding of who Israel hit.