Gaza health ministry denies manipulating death toll figures

At al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza Metropolis, Alam Hirzallah resigns himself to a grim process: registering the deaths of the spouse and two youngsters of his grieving cousin.

His household introduced the our bodies right here on an electrical rickshaw or tuk-tuk. They discovered them of their home in jap Gaza Metropolis after Israeli shelling hit the household residence. Asma Hirzallah, Mayar, 5, and Abdullah, 3, had been killed.

“The hospital requested for his or her full names and ID numbers,” explains Alam, referring to the numbers all Palestinians are given in a inhabitants registry administered by Israel.

“They gave us a paper to verify they had been martyred and informed us to return again for the loss of life certificates. Now we do not know the place to go to bury them because the cemeteries are in areas underneath Israeli management.”

A minimum of 51,266 individuals have been killed within the 18 months because the Gaza conflict started, in response to the Hamas-run Ministry of Well being, with almost a 3rd of the useless aged underneath 18.

Israel has repeatedly challenged the accuracy of the Palestinian fatalities checklist – when it comes to total numbers, and specifically, the demographic breakdown – claiming it’s used as Hamas propaganda. The figures are cited with attribution, by UN businesses and extensively within the media.

The checklist doesn’t distinguish between civilians and members of Palestinian armed teams who’re killed within the conflict, and Israel has accused Hamas of inflating the odds of girls and youngsters.

Not too long ago, a number of media reviews have raised questions concerning the reliability of the statistics by highlighting anomalies between the August and October 2024 and March 2025 lists of fatalities. The reviews concentrate on how some 3,000 names of individuals initially recognized as fatalities had been faraway from later revised lists.

A Gazan well being official, Zaher al-Wahidi, denied to the BBC that victims had vanished or that there was a scarcity of transparency, insisting: “The well being ministry works in the direction of having correct information with excessive credibility.

“In each checklist that will get shared, there’s a larger verification and revision of the checklist. We can not say that the well being ministry removes names. It is not a removing course of, slightly it’s a revision and verification course of.”

So how are the statistics gathered and the way correct are they?

Till the primary months of this conflict, the variety of individuals killed in Gaza was calculated from counting our bodies that arrived in hospitals – like these of Asma Hirzallah and her youngsters.

Medics might log information for all deaths right into a centralised laptop system, which was primarily based at a Ministry of Well being workplace at al-Shifa hospital, with a back-up at al-Rantissi hospital.

Nonetheless, as situations turned extra chaotic and medical websites repeatedly got here underneath assault, this technique turned much less dependable. Through the conflict, Israel says it has focused hospitals – which have protected standing underneath worldwide regulation – as a result of Hamas has used them to cover its fighters and infrastructure – one thing the armed group denies.

From the beginning of 2024, Gazan well being officers launched on-line types which family might use to report their family members useless or lacking.

Based on Mr Wahidi, the top of statistics on the well being ministry, a lot of the names which had been lately faraway from the official checklist as a part of a brand new checking course of had initially been submitted utilizing these types. He says that names that are taken off could later be added again

“A judicial committee was arrange and it appears to be like into all the instances acquired,” Mr Wahidi says. “To make sure credibility we confirm the info in order that it will likely be correct.”

Throughout investigations by the judicial committee, some individuals had been discovered to have died of pure causes – circuitously due to the conflict. When Gazans die from lack of medical remedy, malnutrition or hypothermia, Mr Wahidi clarifies “these instances are oblique and don’t get added to the lists.”

Different people had been wrongly listed as useless however then discovered to have been amongst hundreds of Gazans imprisoned by Israel.

Mr Wahidi confirms that in August after which October, a complete of greater than 3,000 names had been faraway from the checklist, saying this was a precautionary measure pending full checks.

For some pro-Israel teams, comparable to media watchdog HonestReporting, this was sturdy indication of “deliberate manipulation, not sincere error”.

There had been a widespread presumption that solely checked names had been included on the net lists revealed.

“It looks like they’re truly updating the lists extra in actual time, as extra info seems,” says Professor Mike Spagat of Royal Holloway School, chair of Each Casualty Counts, an impartial civilian casualty monitoring organisation. “We must always have regarded the earlier lists as somewhat bit extra provisional than I had assumed.”

Nonetheless, he says he detects no try by well being officers to mislead and sees the adjustments as “an enormous clean-up operation”.

He factors out that the newest modifications to the checklist led to a small enhance within the share of grownup males amongst these killed, countering the concept the unique inclusion of the three,000-plus names was accomplished in an try and exaggerate the proportion of girls and youngsters.

The Gaza well being ministry says it has additionally lately audited information in its official fatalities checklist from hospital mortuaries for errors and omissions.

When deaths had been registered by associates or neighbours, it says, they typically didn’t know the ID numbers of these killed or their full names – which embrace the daddy and grandfather’s names. In some instances, this resulted within the flawed individuals being marked as useless.

1000’s of our bodies which can be nonetheless underneath the rubble left by Israeli air strikes, in addition to about 900 that are unidentified, aren’t at present included within the well being ministry checklist, the ministry says.

Nonetheless, the current two-month ceasefire – which allowed a whole bunch of hundreds of displaced Gazans to return to what was left of their houses – noticed almost 800 corpses being retrieved, recognized and registered.

In late January, the BBC filmed workers from the Hamas-run Civil Defence agency as they set about retrieving human stays which had been left for months in Wadi Gaza – often known as the Netzarim Hall – after a pullout by Israeli forces.

With no DNA testing obtainable in Gaza, every corpse was given a serial quantity. Lengthy types had been crammed in to log the bones and clothes collected to attempt to establish the useless.

“We search for distinctive private belongings: a watch, a necklace or an earring. After we search the our bodies, it’s extremely potential that we’ll discover a driver’s licence or ID card,” mentioned Sameh Khalifa, who led the workforce.

“Even a damaged tooth generally is a distinguishing mark that may assist a household recognise a lacking liked one.”

For the reason that resumption of Israel’s navy offensive in Gaza on 18 March, the numbers killed have risen each day.

Israel periodically estimates the variety of Palestinian fighters killed. Initially of this 12 months, it assessed that 20,000 members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad had been among the many useless. In mid-April it mentioned there had been “greater than 100 focused eliminations” prior to now month.

Israel doesn’t present its figures for civilian deaths in Gaza and has not formally challenged any of the names on the native well being ministry casualty checklist.

The conflict started on 7 October 2023, when Hamas led a cross-border assault on southern Israel, killing about 1,200 individuals, principally civilians, and taking some 250 individuals into captivity in Gaza. Since then, the Israeli navy says that 408 of its troopers have been killed in fight.

Worldwide journalists, together with the BBC, are blocked by Israel from coming into Gaza independently, so are unable to confirm figures from both aspect.

We rely closely on native Palestinian journalists working with us to entry details about lethal assaults – interviewing witnesses in addition to visiting bomb websites and hospital mortuaries to movie footage, which is shared with us.

General, the numbers killed prior to now 12 months and a half dwarf these from earlier rounds of preventing within the decades-old Israel-Palestinian battle and but, for the second, there isn’t any finish in sight to the conflict.