Farhan Haq, a UN spokesperson, said the new smaller numbers reflected those bodies which had been fully identified. The bigger figures included corpses for whom identification has so far not been completed.
This is the most cautious body count, which you necessarily know has to be far below the actual number of casualties because neither health workers, nor UN officials, nor Hamas has the means to clear the rubble in destroyed and occupied cities and look for corpses. We won’t know the total extent of deaths in this war until someone has the capacity to conduct a complete census of the remaining Gazans, and that number is compared to the census immediately prior to the conflict. All in all, the headline is really misleading, because “estimated total casualties” and “fully identified casualties” are two different statistics.