My comment from the other article that is currently around:
We are talking bodys that are mutilated, often beyond recognition. So you find a male body in the age range of 14-20. Now do you count it as a child or as an adult? If you know it is Abdul Raheeem 17 years old, you can make that assessment. But otherwise you can only make a best guess. Problem is, if you only find half a body and it is decayed mostly. The most reliable way to distinguish male and female skeletons is the pelvis. For the other bones you have indications but they aren’t as definite. So if you find an upper body without the pelvis you again have to guess. And digging up mass graves or collecting body parts after a bombing is not exactly the environment for a in depths medical analysis.
This is the problem why we have incomplete data. And this is why there is 10.000 bodys that are still unidentified. Note this is not the number of bodies presumed under the rubble. That is another 10.000. So we have roughly the following split:
25.000 Bodies identified (We know the name, age and gender of the killed person)
10.000 Bodies unidentified (We have to guess for age and gender)
10.000 Bodies presumed under the rubble, but no means to recover, identify and properly burry them yet. (We have to guess based on other statistics how the gender and age is distributed)
So that put us at 35.000 confirmed dead and another 10.000 presumed dead.