In any war zone counting the dead is a challenge and Gaza is no different.
As the battles intensify, the chaotic situation – with shelling by Israeli forces, fighting on the ground, communications disruptions, fuel shortages and crumbling infrastructure – makes obtaining accurate information on the number of dead extremely difficult. difficult.
Palestinian officials have said there are now “significant difficulties” in obtaining updated information due to communications blackouts in the Strip.
The Ministry of Health is Gaza’s official source for death figures, which it updates regularly. On Monday, November 13, the organization gave the figure of 11,240 people killed, including 4,630 childrensince the Hamas attacks against Israel on October 7 that sparked the current war.
Israel has questioned the numbers, although it has recently had to revise its own death figures downward by about 200, from 1,400 to 1,200.
US President Joe Biden has said he has “no confidence” in the Gaza statistics. But international organizations, such as the World Health Organization (WHO), have said they have no reason not to believe them.
The BBC has been looking in detail at how casualty figures are counted in Gaza.
The statistics
The Gaza Ministry of Health regularly reports the death toll through social media, with an additional breakdown of the number of women, children and elderly people who have died.
The figures do not indicate the cause of deathbut they describe the deceased as victims of “Israeli aggression.”
The ministry also gives figures for injured and missing people, as some people are still trapped under the rubble of collapsed buildings, the Palestinian Red Crescent explains.
Ministry of Health officials assure that death tolls are recorded by medical professionals and that only include deaths registered in hospitals.
The figures do not distinguish between military and civilian deaths. And since they do not take into account those who died at the site of the explosions whose bodies have not been found or those who were buried immediately, count may not be exactGaza officials admit.
This last point was highlighted by the Biden administration last week, when a senior US official admitted that the death toll is likely higher than reported so far.
“Frankly, we think they are very high [las cifras de víctimas] and they could be even higher than those cited,” admitted Barbara Leaf, Undersecretary of State for Middle East Affairs, before the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
This contrasts sharply with the opinion of Biden himself, who on October 25 said he had “no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are dying.”
However, he did not provide any evidence to justify his skepticism.
A day after the American president discarded the figures, the Gaza Ministry of Health published an extensive list with the names of all those killed between October 7 and 26. The list included more than 6,000 full names of victims with their ages, sex and identification number.
How was it compiled? The BBC has spoken to people involved in collecting and organizing the data, as well as an academic who has checked for duplicates on the list.
Independent research group Airwars, which is involved in the process of matching deaths and has investigated names on the Ministry of Health’s list, and the United Nations, which has assessed conflict death tolls in Gaza, were also contacted. previous.
Health workers like Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah, a plastic surgeon with Doctors Without Borders who has treated people in Gaza City hospitals, are key to collecting those numbers.
The doctor explained that the hospital morgue registers each death after confirming the identity of the deceased with their relatives.
Abu Sittah believes that the number of deaths recorded so far is much lower than those that have actually occurred.
“Most deaths occur at home”he states, while adding: “We couldn’t identify them, we didn’t register them.”
However, once a body is found, “it must be taken to the hospital to be registered,” explains a spokesman for the Palestinian Red Crescent.
To examine the Ministry of Health’s list, the BBC cross-referenced the names on it with the names of dead people who appeared in our reports.
One of those deaths, as reported by the BBC, was that of Dr. Midhat Mahmoud Saidam, who died in an attack on October 14. The BBC spoke to his former colleagues.
An analysis of satellite images carried out by the BBC showed damage in the area where the doctor lived around the date of his death. An image posted on social media shows a body bag with his name and details written on it.
Airwars is doing similar work, but on a larger scale. As part of his investigative work he has compared the names of the dead on the Ministry of Health list with the areas that have been bombed.
So far, Airwars has found 72 names on the ministry list in five of the areas he has investigatedincluding that of Dr. Saidham.
Their investigation also found that 23 of their relatives also died and all were registered on the Ministry of Health list.
Examining the statistics
The BBC also spoke to the UN and Human Rights Watch, who said they have no reason to disbelieve the figures published by the Gaza Ministry of Health.
The UN trusts the Ministry of Health as a source of statistics on victims in the area.
“We continue to include their data in our reports, and its source is clear,” the international organization said in a statement.
“It is almost impossible for the UN at this time to provide verification,” they added.
Others who have analyzed the Ministry of Health figures are Professor of Economics Michael Spagat, from Royal Holloway, University of London, who chairs the organization Every Casualty Counts, which studies the number of deaths. in wars.
The professor says that he and a colleague They found only one duplicate entry in the Ministry of Health data: that of a 14-year-old boy.
However, one discrepancy remains highly controversial: that of the death toll following an explosion at Al Ahli Hospital in Gaza City on October 17.
The Ministry of Health said 500 people had died, and that figure was later lowered to 471.
A US intelligence assessment maintains that it was lower, “probably between 100 to 300.” The Israeli military has used Al Ahli’s figures as a basis for claiming that the Gaza Health Ministry “continuously inflates the number of civilian victims”.
The BBC has made repeated attempts to contact the Gaza Ministry of Health but has so far received no response.
Professor Spagat also reviewed previous conflicts and found that the Ministry of Health’s figures in Gaza have come under scrutiny before.
An analysis of statistics from the Gaza Ministry of Health during the conflict between Israel and Hamas in 2014, in which Gaza was bombed, found no discrepancies.
The data from the Strip’s health authorities was compared with the registry carried out by the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, Spagat explained.
The Gaza Health Ministry said that 2,310 residents of the Strip died in 2014, while B’Tselem counted 2,185 deaths. The UN said 2,251 Palestinians were killed, including 1,462 civilians, and Israel’s Foreign Ministry said the 2014 war killed 2,125 Palestinians.
These types of discrepancies are “quite normal,” Spagat said, since some people may have died in hospital for reasons that were later proven to be unrelated to the conflict.
Ola Awad-Shakhshir, president of the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, in Ramallah, West Bank, receives regular updates on deaths in Gaza.
Awad-Shakhshir says that Israel’s Interior Ministry controls the identification numbers of newborns in Gaza and the West Bank, the same identification numbers that appear in the Gaza Health Ministry’s death registry.
Israel’s Population Registration Office has files that match those of Gaza and the West Bank.
They ask for caution
When the BBC approached a spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to ask why they had cast doubt on the death tolls in Gaza, he said: The Ministry of Health is a branch of Hamas and that any information provided by it should be “viewed with caution”.
But it did not provide any evidence of inconsistencies in the data published by the Ministry of Health.
We also asked the Israeli Prime Minister’s office how the Israelis killed on October 7 by Hamas were recorded, but there was no response.
However, in recent days Israel has reduced the death toll during the attack to about 1,200from the previous figure of 1,400.
Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Lior Haiat said the revised figure was because many bodies were not identified immediately after the attack, and “Now we think they belong to terrorists and not Israeli victims”.
The Israeli government has not published a detailed list of civilian casualties, although some Israeli media outlets have compiled lists of names, ages and locations of deaths.
Israel Police say more than 850 civilian bodies have been identified as work to try Identifying the remains using specialized forensic techniques follows.
There is a public list of Israeli soldiers killed so far that includes 48 who died in fighting inside Gaza.
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