On 28 September 2026, Ramiz Alakbarov, Acting Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, briefed the Security Council on implementation of resolution 2334 (2016). His remarks set the window at 13 June to 18 September. He is a Secretariat political officer on a peace-process file. He is not a medical examiner and not a combat-status board.
He described Israel Defense Forces operations west of the ceasefire “yellow line,” including airstrikes, then recited a death total drawn from “the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health.” That sequence presents 360 dead as the measured result of Israeli fire in the bin. Naming the office is a label, not a method. The meeting record of the same briefing has him adding that Israeli sources recorded no Israeli fatalities in Gaza in the period. The contrast still does not turn a Hamas total into a targeting verdict.
What the figure does not count
The Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health is the health bureaucracy of Hamas’s Islamist terror regime. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies records that “the ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in its count.” The Jerusalem Post reports the same limit: the Hamas-affiliated ministry “doesn't differentiate between combatants and civilians.” A combatant-blind total is not a civilian census. It is not a finding that Israel aimed at civilians. It is a dashboard number.
The phrase “including women and children” hangs on the injury line of “over 1,600.” It is not an audited breakdown of the 360, and woman or child is not a synonym for non-combatant. The Jerusalem Post, covering the Henry Jackson Society paper Questionable Counting, records that ministry fatality lists have put men in women’s columns, registered adults as children, and included natural deaths in war reporting. Those are defects in the same counting system. They are not a rival tally of Alakbarov’s 360. The problem is what the figure is defined as.
He supplied no combatant share, no identification protocol, and no tighter date than a three-month dump. “Over 1,600” is a floor, not a register. This wording presents 360 killed as an established human cost of Israeli operations. The ministry’s own method does not support that use.
What the briefing left out
The war did not open on 13 June 2026. On 7 October 2023, Hamas-led terrorists murdered more than 1,200 people and abducted 251. That massacre is the start of the war, not a balancing footnote. A 2334 recitation that treats later Gaza deaths as a free-standing ledger of Israeli fire, while leaving Hamas unnamed as the author of the war, is incomplete by design.
Self-defense and counter-terror work against remaining Hamas infrastructure after a ceasefire is not a category on a Hamas form. If Muslim-Arab jihad militants killed in those operations sit inside the 360, they are not a women’s-and-children’s exhibit. He did not separate them.
He took a Hamas ministry period total, set it next to Israeli fire, and handed the Security Council a body count it had not independently made.