According to Palestinian health authorities, at least 40,000 people have been killed in the Israeli attacks, close to 70 percent of them children and women.
An unknown number are missing in the ruins, and the number of wounded is approaching 100,000.
Israel has repeatedly questioned the death toll from the Palestinian Ministry of Health, as did US President Joe Biden early in the war. He hasn’t done that since.
Credible
The UN and others operating in Gaza believe that the information about the killed and wounded is largely correct, which has also been the case on previous occasions when Israel has attacked Gaza.
– The figures may not be accurate from minute to minute. But they reflect on the whole scale, Michael Ryan of the World Health Organization (WHO) asserted when the war was three months old.
The same was repeated by WHO spokesperson Margaret Harris in May.
– We have long collaborated with the Ministry of Health in Gaza, and we can confirm that they have good capacity in terms of data collection and analysis and that what they have previously reported has been considered to be credible, she said.
The recognized medical journal Lancet have pointed out the same.
– The figures from the Ministry of Health in Gaza have been accurate in previous conflicts, and the deviation between the reports from there and independent analyzes from the UN has only been between 1.5 and 3.8 per cent, they stated early in the war.
Misunderstanding
Some critics claim that the death toll cannot be trusted because Hamas controls the health ministry in Gaza, but that claim is based on a misunderstanding.
Although Hamas is in power in the Gaza Strip, the Ministry of Health is governed by the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and is headed by Minister of Health Mai al-Kaila in Ramallah. She is a doctor, belongs to President Mahmoud Abbas’s secular Fatah party and has previously worked for the UN.
The employees of the ministry and the healthcare system in Gaza come from both Fatah and Hamas, and many of them have no party affiliation. They are paid by the authorities in Ramallah.
Routines
20 of the 36 hospitals in Gaza have been put out of business by the Israeli attacks, and this has contributed to making the reporting of the dead and wounded insufficient.
Journalists from the AFP news agency is among those who have investigated the routines for how the hospitals enter the name, sex, date of birth and ID number of the deceased in the Ministry of Health’s database on a daily basis. The identification of the victims takes place with the assistance of family members and friends.
When no one who knew the victims can contribute to identification, or the injuries to them are so great that they are unrecognizable, health workers enter what little information they can find.
Any characteristics such as birthmarks are photographed, and personal belongings that can contribute to identification are recorded.
Database
The Palestinian Ministry of Health has informed several times about the procedures for registering the dead.
As soon as a person is declared dead in one of the public hospitals in Gaza, information about that person and the ID number is entered into the hospital’s database.
Once a day, the hospital sends the information to the ministry.
Private hospitals and health institutions are required to fill in a form with the same type of information about those killed, and these must be sent to the Ministry of Health within 24 hours.
Verifying
The ministry’s employees examine and verify the data, among other things to ensure that no one is registered as dead several times.
A separate website has also been created where families can enter information about those killed, and this is compared with information obtained from the hospitals.
The independent organization Airwars which for years has focused on how wars and conflicts affect the civilian population, is among those who have scrutinized the credibility of the Palestinian Ministry of Health’s information on casualties.
Airwars compared information on 3,000 people in the database with what had previously been reported in the media and found “a high degree of agreement”.
Underreporting
While some accuse the Palestinian authorities of exaggerating how many civilians have been killed since October last year, others believe that the real number of dead could be much higher.
Among those who have raised questions about this is Nathaniel Raymond. He heads the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health and has worked for over 20 years to determine death tolls in armed conflicts and natural disasters.
– It is a logical assumption that the figures reported are too low, he has pointed out.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has also stated that there may be under-reporting and has indicated that many are missing in bomb ruins.
The Palestinian Civil Defense estimates that 10,000 people are buried under the rubble, a number that is reproduced by the United Nations.
Save the Children estimates that there are 4,000 children among them.
Indirect deaths
Without deciding how many have been killed, a group of international researchers recently estimated that the war in Gaza – even if it were to end now – would probably claim over 180,000 Palestinian lives.
The researchers, among them professor Martin McKee at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, indicates that the number of indirect deaths from hunger, disease and lack of health care in wars is usually 3 to 15 times higher than the number killed in hostilities.
A conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per direct death thus implies that the war in Gaza will claim at least 186,000 lives, the researchers write in Lancet.
McKee is also associated with the Israeli Public Health Institute as a consultant.
Sky-high numbers
The Israeli attacks against the Gaza Strip have now continued for over 300 days. The daily casualty figures have decreased since the first months of the war, but are still sky-high compared to other wars and conflicts in the world.
Since the outbreak of war, an average of at least 130 Palestinians have been killed daily. Another 300 are wounded, many of them maimed for life. The psychological consequences of the war, especially among traumatized children, one hardly dares to think about.
90 percent of Gaza’s population is now on the run and living in primitive conditions, and according to the UN, famine and epidemics threaten. But the bombs keep falling.
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2024-08-11 19:39:17