Much of Gaza has been reduced to rubble by 10 months of war, and counting the dead has become a challenge for the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry as the death toll approaches 40,000.
Israel has repeatedly questioned the reliability of the daily figures released 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 reliable and are frequently cited by international organisations.
data collection
Two AFP reporters saw health facilities registering deaths into the ministry’s database.
Gaza health officials first identify the bodies of the deceased through identification by a relative or friend, or by recovery of personal belongings.
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 are unidentified because they are unrecognizable or when no one claims them, workers record the death under a number, along with whatever information they can gather.
Any distinguishing marks that might aid in later identification, whether personal items or birthmarks, are collected and photographed.
Central Registry
Gaza’s Health Ministry has issued several statements explaining its process for compiling the death toll.
In public hospitals under the direct supervision of the region’s Hamas government, the “personal information and identification number” of every Palestinian killed during the war is entered into the hospital database as soon as they are declared dead.
The data is then sent to the central registry of the Ministry of Health on a daily basis.
Information on deaths in private hospitals and clinics is recorded in a form, which has to be sent to the ministry within 24 hours for adding it to the central registry, a ministry statement said.
The ministry’s “information centre” verifies the data entries to ensure there are no duplicates or errors, and they are then saved in the database, the statement said.
Gaza residents are also encouraged by the Palestinian authorities to report any deaths in their families on a designated government website. The data is used by the ministry for verification.
The ministry is staffed by civil servants who are accountable to the Palestinian Authority based in the West Bank as well as the Hamas-led government in Gaza.
‘high correlation’
An investigation by Airways, an NGO focused on the impact of the war on civilians, analyzed data on 3,000 dead and found a “high correlation” between the ministry’s data and information provided online by Palestinian civilians, with 75 percent of the names publicly reported were also on the ministry’s list.
The study found that the ministry’s data had become “less accurate” as the war had prolonged, attributing this to the heavy damage caused to the health infrastructure by the war.
For example, at the Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza, which is still partially functional, only 50 out of 400 computers are working, its director Atef al-Hout told AFP.
Israeli officials often criticize the ministry’s figures for failing to distinguish between combatants and civilians. But neither the military nor Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu deny the scale of the overall count.
The press office of Gaza’s Hamas government estimates that about 70 percent of the approximately 40,000 dead are women (about 11,000) or children (at least 16,300).
Several UN agencies, including the agency in charge of Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), have said the ministry’s figures are reliable.
“In the past — in the five, six cycles of the conflict in the Gaza Strip — these figures were considered reliable and nobody ever challenged these figures,” the agency’s head, Philippe Lazzarini, said in October.
A study by the British medical review journal The Lancet estimated that the war in Gaza has caused 186,000 deaths directly or indirectly, as a result of the humanitarian crisis it has created.
The war in Gaza began with a Hamas attack on October 7, resulting in the deaths of 1,198 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP count based on Israeli official figures.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
