The difficulty of accurately counting the martyrs of the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip is increasing, with the continued violent bombing and destruction of basic infrastructure, the repeated disruption of telephone and Internet services, and the martyrdom or disappearance of a number of those responsible for the documentation process, while the latest toll reached more than 16 thousand martyrs and 43 thousand injured. Most of them are women and children.
In the first 6 weeks of the aggression, hospital morgues across Gaza sent the numbers to the main statistics center of the Ministry of Health in Gaza in Al-Shifa Hospital, and officials used Excel to record the names, ages, and ID numbers of the martyrs, and transmitted this to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Ramallah.
However, of the four officials who managed the documentation process at Al-Shifa Medical Complex, one of them was martyred in an Israeli raid on the hospital, and the others were arrested when Israeli forces seized the building under the pretext that it was the operations center of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), according to the Ramallah Ministry of Health.
With the collapse of the humanitarian truce that lasted for one week and ended last Friday, the update on the death toll and the injured, which was issued daily at a conference held by Ministry of Health spokesman Ashraf Al-Qudra, became irregular.
Non-comprehensive toll
Experts confirmed to Reuters that the current toll of victims of the Israeli aggression on Gaza is not comprehensive.
A spokesman for a United Nations human rights agency said that their monitoring of the numbers provided by the Ministry of Health in Gaza indicates that they are lower than reality. Because it does not include the dead who did not reach hospitals, or those who may be under the rubble, as he put it.
Palestinian Health Minister Mai Al-Kaila also said that the number of bodies feared to be buried under the rubble now reaches thousands, adding that a large part of the drilling equipment belonging to the Civil Defense Forces in Gaza was destroyed during Israeli air strikes.
Credible numbers
Public health experts told Reuters that Gaza before the war had good population statistics and smooth health information, better than most countries in the Middle East, and there is no reason to doubt its validity.
Professor at the London School of Hygiene, Una Campbell, confirmed that the Palestinian health authorities enjoy solid credibility in their methods for maintaining basic statistics and tracking deaths in general, not only in times of war, and that United Nations agencies rely on them.
For his part, Nathaniel Raymond, Executive Director of the Human Research Laboratory at Yale University’s School of Public Health, pointed out that the Palestinian data collection capabilities are professional, and many of the ministry’s employees were trained in the United States, he said.
Documentation is more difficult
Since the expansion of the ground operation into the southern Gaza Strip after the truce, the ability of the Palestinian Ministry of Health to collect accurate data on the number of martyrs has declined, especially with the systematic destruction to which the health sector is being exposed.
The World Health Organization’s envoy to Gaza, Richard Peppercorn, confirmed that documenting war victims is becoming more difficult, because they usually obtain numbers from the Ministry of Health, but for days the documentation has relied more on estimates due to the difficulty of collecting data.
Israel did not deny it
The Israeli authorities did not question the death toll announced by the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, as an Israeli official said that the announced toll was “true in one way or another.”
He added that about a third of those killed in Gaza so far were what he described as enemy fighters, estimating their number between 5,000 and 10,000, without providing details of justifications for this estimate.
