According to the Gaza Ministry of Health under the terrorist organization Hamas, more than 17,000 people had died in Israeli airstrikes and ground attacks by Friday. About 7,000 of them have been minors, the health authority says.
There are practically no other statistics available about the victims of the Israeli attack in Gaza other than the numbers reported by the Hamas-controlled health authority.
However, the international community and organizations that monitor the number of victims of conflicts consider the figures to be reliable. The World Health Organization under the UN also estimates that the figures reported from Gaza are correct.
Not even Israel has recently questioned the numbers reported about Gaza, says a senior researcher specializing in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict Timo R. Stewart From the Foreign Policy Institute.
– Now it is already quite clear that even in Israel the numbers are considered to be at least largely reliable.
Interviewed by the news agency Reuters on Monday An Israeli official, who remained anonymous, said he considered the information about 15,000 dead reported from Gaza at the time to be “more or less correct”.
Biden expressed his doubts in October
Early in the war, Israel and the United States strongly disputed the number of reported dead in Gaza. In October, the president Joe Biden said directly that he doubted the figures.
After that, the Palestinian Authority based in Ramallah in the West Bank published information on the more than 7,000 Gazans who had died in the war up to that point. The list contained the names and IDs of the victims.
Three on that list for the medical journal The Lancet the researcher who analyzed it was considered as unlikely that the information is not true.
The casualty figures reported by the Ministry of Health under Hamas from previous conflicts have subsequently proven to be correct. According to Stewart, the statistical method used in Gaza is also considered reliable.
For the first six weeks of the war, hospital morgues in Gaza collected and sent data on the dead to the Ministry of Health’s statisticians at al-Shifa, Gaza’s largest hospital. The Excel tables contained the victims’ names, ages and ID card numbers.
The information from Al-Shifa Hospital was transferred to the Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Health in Ramallah.
– Although Hamas has ruled Gaza, the network of authorities there is basically the same as in the West Bank, because it was set up at the same time in the 1990s as part of the Palestinian Authority. The same professional approach is followed there, Stewart estimates.
However, many of the dead have been left in the ruins and therefore unaccounted for. Many international organizations, such as the UN, estimate that the known death rates are too low.
After the end of the ceasefire, information has been provided more irregularly
At the moment, the hospitals in Gaza are no longer functioning properly due to the bombings, and it is possible that the casualty figures will not be updated because of that.
Israel has justified attacks in the vicinity of hospitals by the fact that, according to it, there have been military targets of Hamas.
After the end of the week-long ceasefire, information on the number of dead has been given more irregularly.
– Gaza no longer has the same capacity to collect and maintain statistics. Some of the people who did this have died or disappeared. Hospitals are not functioning or are in chaos and their ability to maintain statistics has weakened. Consequently, there have been no more daily updates, says Stewart.
Errors have also occurred in the statistics
Errors in the statistics of the dead have presumably occurred during the conflict.
Stewart points out that Israel initially announced that 1,400 Israelis had died in the Hamas terrorist attack, but later specified the number of victims to 1,200. This was because it took time to identify the victims. Some of those thought to be Israeli dead were actually dead Hamas terrorists.
– I wouldn’t be surprised if there have been mistakes in Gaza, but in principle the system is reliable. The Israeli authorities have also acknowledged this recently.
The high number of minor victims in Gaza has shocked the world. The number of child victims is explained by the fact that more than half of Gaza’s population are minors.
It is difficult to compare the number of victims with other wars, because the conditions in Gaza, which is very densely populated and has a small area, are very different from many other war zones.
– War is not fought in actual frontline conditions. War is fought in urban settings, where there are typically many civilian casualties.
Most of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents have been forced to flee their homes. According to the UN, aid organizations are no longer able to operate even in the southern part of Gaza due to the Israeli attack.
“Israel succeeded in questioning the casualty figures”
The doubt about the veracity of the casualty figures in the world’s media is considered by Stewart to be a success of Israel’s information warfare.
– It is interesting that the doubt about the reliability of the death toll went over so well in the Western media despite the fact that, for example, the UN and many organizations said from the beginning that no one has disputed the number of deaths in previous wars and the numbers have been considered reliable.
– And when Biden announced that he didn’t trust the numbers, distrust spread.
The voice of the United States has changed, because last Friday the foreign minister Antony Blinken called on Israel to do more to protect Gazan civilians.
According to Timo R. Stewart, however, Israel managed to shift attention away from the huge number of victims in the earlier phase of the war. He asks if Israel disputed the casualty figures to divert attention from the huge number of civilian deaths.
– Who would trust the terrorist organization (Hamas). This is a good reminder of how war also extends to communication.
Read the latest news about the war in Gaza in this article