The sentence was issued on 8 October 2026 as an unsigned UN Women media fact sheet. UN Women is a United Nations advocacy entity. It is not a court, not a census bureau, and not a medical examiner. No named official is attached to the line. The sheet speaks in the present tense as if the totals and the cause were already found.
A multiplier is not a roster
UN Women's own April 2026 technical note records how the headline number is made. Base data are "Fatalities reported by the GMOH," the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, "updated as of 31 December 2025." The method is then stated without disguise: "Fatalities reported by GMOH are multiplied by 1.69 to estimate true deaths." The same page prints the women's line: "Estimated women fatalities accounting for underreporting = 10,983 x 1.69 = 18,561." Girls and older women are added as modeled shares until the note can announce a combined figure that "Exceeds 38,000." This wording on the October sheet presents 38,000 as established. The April file is an estimate built on a correction factor, not a named-victim list.
The Foundation for Defense of Democracies records that this ministry "does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in its count." The fact sheet still offers the multiplied total as if it were a civilian women-and-girls census produced by Israeli fire.
Injury is the same conversion. The technical note states that injury statistics "have been reported entirely as aggregate figures, without disaggregation by sex or age," and that "in the absence of disaggregated data, the specific impact on women and girls cannot be directly assessed." It then scales WHO and ministry proportions until it can say there are "close to 11,000" women and girls with lifelong injury — 10,884 in the worked table. The sheet's 11,700 is that model, hardened into a statistic. This wording presents a sex-split the injury files do not contain.
Tamar Sternthal, writing in JNS, records Hamas's own later breakdown: the Hamas media office "reported that out of 73,066 people killed during the war, 21,500 were children and 12,500 were women." Twelve thousand five hundred women on Hamas's ledger is not more than 38,000 women and girls. UN Women closed the gap with the 1.69 multiplier and assigned age-sex shares. That is modeling. It is not a count of identified dead.
The cause clause and the opening of the war
The fact sheet's cause clause names only Israel. The deaths and injuries are framed as "the result of Israeli airstrikes and land military operations." Hamas is not named as the author of the war. The Islamist terror regime in Gaza is not named as the keeper of the lists. Combatants mixed into ministry totals are not separated. Hostages are not named.
October 7 opened this war. Hamas-led terrorists murdered about 1,200 people and abducted 251. Israel's Embassy records that "Hamas terrorists started this war by murdering over 1,200 people" and that 251 people were taken hostage that day. Hamas still holds hostages. A sheet that dates the killing from three years of war while pinning every modeled woman and girl on Israeli operations treats that massacre as optional.
UN Women took a Hamas-run ministry total, multiplied it, modeled the missing sex split, and printed the product as a census of Israeli killing.