The death toll from Israel’s near-incessant bombing and shelling of targets in the Gaza Strip has reached since this weekend at more than 8,000. At least, according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza. The Israeli military suggests that those numbers should be taken with a grain of salt, as does US President Joe Biden sowed doubt about this last weeksaying that “he has no confidence in the figure the Palestinians are using.”
To the anger of many Palestinians, who call it a shame that Biden gave the impression that Palestinians are willing to fiddle with even their death tolls to sway international public opinion. “As if the president wasn’t already complicit enough in the dehumanization of Palestinians, he now says he doesn’t trust us when we say we’re going to be killed,” said Palestinian-American activist and comedian Amer Zahr at TV channel Al Jazeera. “How much lower can you stoop than to say we lie about dying?”
It is not clear what Biden and the Israelis base their criticism on. Critics point out that in the recent past the United States has often based itself on figures from the United Nations, which largely correspond to those from the same Palestinian ministry. Biden’s doubts may be related to the confusion after the explosion at Al-Ahli hospital on October 17. The ministry initially reported that 500 had been killed and later reduced this to 471. US intelligence services estimated the death toll at 100 to 300.
Solid reputation
The Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip has according to most independent experts a fairly solid reputation when it comes to reporting on death tolls. “We know their methodology and know that it is generally reliable,” said Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch, on the phone from the United States. “We have been following this file for three decades and in special cases we also conduct our own investigation. Our findings generally correspond with those of the ministry. The figures from the United Nations also correspond with this.”
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According to some rough estimatesnot from the ministry by the way, there are still about a thousand dead under the rubble.
In response to Biden’s comments, the ministry published last week a list of 7,028 Palestinian dead, all killed since October 7, the day Hamas fighters invaded Israel and killed more than 1,400 Israelis and took more than 200 hostages to the Gaza Strip. Among those 7,028 Palestinians were 2,913 children. The list contained 6,747 names. The identities of the bodies of 281 Palestinians could not yet be determined.
The ministry itself is under the control of Hamas, which has been in charge of the Gaza Strip since 2007. Some of the executives were also appointed by Hamas. But according to experts, that does not mean that only Hamas supporters work there. Some of the staff dates back to the time when the Palestinian Authority held sway in the Gaza Strip. He still pays the staff and maintains contact with colleagues in Gaza City as much as possible from Ramallah, which is located on the West Bank.
There are also civil servants and technocrats working there without explicit political preferences and the ministry also partly works as an ordinary bureaucracy with its own processes, according to Shakir. “We have no indications that matters have changed during this war.”
Verification options
Shakir does acknowledge that this time there are fewer opportunities for verification than in previous conflicts, because Israel has hermetically sealed off the Gaza Strip. Independent researchers and aid workers do not have access to the area, even if they wanted to. After all, the bombings are more intense than ever. “But through satellite images and data from conflicts elsewhere in the world, we can also determine that the ministry’s death toll corresponds to what you would expect from such heavy bombing in such a densely populated area.” It is not clear what the impact of disrupted communications within the Gaza Strip as a result of bombings has had on the death toll in recent days.
Human Rights Watch does not wish to comment on estimates of the number of injured people, because different definitions are often used. The same applies to another sensitive figure: that of the numbers of Palestinian civilians killed in relation to the number of Hamas fighters killed. For example, do you count a killed Palestinian police officer as a civilian or as a fighter? Israel does the latter, the Palestinians do not.
In previous conflicts it became clear that very different estimates of the number of civilians killed were circulating. For example, in 2014 the UN concluded that 69 percent of the 2,104 Palestinians killed were civilians. Israel, on the other hand, ended up with 52 percent citizens. The rest are believed to have been fallen Hamas fighters. Israel has not yet given exact figures about this war, but Prime Minister Netanyahu has stated that thousands of Hamas fighters, ‘terrorists’ in his terminology, have already been ‘eliminated’.
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