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Israel-Gaza war continues since October 7, 2023 (File)
After the 10-month war reduced much of Gaza to rubble, counting the dead has become a challenge for the Hamas-ruled territory’s health ministry, with the death toll nearing 40,000.
Israel has repeatedly questioned the credibility of the daily figures presented by the ministry, and US President Joe Biden did the same in the early stages of the war.
But several UN agencies working in Gaza have said the figures are credible and are often cited by international bodies.
Data collection
Two AFP correspondents looked at the ministry’s database of health facilities to death.
Gazan health officials first identify the bodies of the dead through visual identification by a relative or friend or the recovery of personal items.
The deceased person’s information is then entered into the Ministry of Health’s digital database, usually including name, gender, date of birth and identification number.
When bodies cannot be identified because they are unidentifiable or when no one claims them, staff record the death under a number with all the information they were able to gather.
Any distinguishing marks that may later aid identification, whether personal items or birthmarks, are collected and photographed.
Central Registry
Gaza’s Ministry of Health has issued several statements outlining the methodology for compiling the death toll.
In state-run hospitals under the direct supervision of the Hamas government in the region, the “personal information and identification number” of each Palestinian killed during the war is entered into the hospital’s database as soon as they are pronounced dead.
This data is then sent to the central registry of the Ministry of Health on a daily basis.
For those who die in private hospitals and clinics, their information is captured on a form that must be sent to the ministry within 24 hours to be included in the central registry, a ministry statement said.
The ministry’s “information center” then verifies the data entries “to ensure there are no duplicates or errors” before saving them to the database, the statement added.
Gaza residents are also encouraged by the Palestinian Authority to report any deaths in their families to the official website. The data is used to verify the ministry.
The ministry has civil servants who answer to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank as well as the Hamas-led government in Gaza.
‘high correlation’
A study by Airways, an NGO focusing on the impact of war on civilians, analyzed data records of 3,000 of the dead and found discrepancies between the ministry’s data and online reports by Palestinian citizens. “found a high correlation,” with 75 percent reporting publicly. Names are also appearing in the ministry’s list.
The study found that the ministry’s figures became “less accurate” as the war continued, a development it attributed to the heavy damage to health infrastructure as a result of the war.
For example, at Nasir Hospital in southern Gaza, one of the hospitals that is still at least partially functioning, only 50 of the 400 computers still work, its director Atif al-Hawt said. told FP.
Israeli officials often criticize the ministry’s statistics for failing to distinguish between fighters and civilians. But neither the military nor Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu deny the scale of the total toll.
The press office of Gaza’s Hamas government estimates that about 70 percent of the nearly 40,000 dead were women (about 11,000) or children (at least 16,300).
Several UN agencies, including the Palestinian Refugee Agency (UNRWA), have said the ministry’s figures are credible.
“In the past — five, six rounds of conflict in the Gaza Strip — these figures were considered credible and no one really challenged those figures,” agency chief Philip Lazzarini said in October. “
A study in the British medical review The Lancet estimated that 186,000 deaths could be attributed to the war in Gaza, directly or indirectly as a result of the humanitarian crisis it has spawned.
The war in Gaza began with an October 7 attack by Hamas, which killed 1,198 people, mostly civilians.
(Other than the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
