Much of Gaza has been reduced to rubble by 10 months of Israel’s bombing. Counting the dead has become a challenge for the Palestinian health ministry, as the death toll nears 40,000.
As part of its belligerence, Israel has repeatedly questioned the credibility of the daily figures put out by the ministry. However, several United Nations agencies that operate in Gaza have said the figures are credible and they are frequently cited by international organisations.
A grim exercise in data collection
Two Agence France-Presse (AFP) correspondents witnessed health facilities enter deaths in the ministry’s database.
Gaza health officials first identify the bodies of the dead. This is done by the visual recognition of a relative or friend, or by the recovery of personal items.
The deceased’s information is then entered in the health ministry’s digital database. Usually this includes name, gender, birth date, and ID number.
When bodies cannot be identified because they are unrecognisable or when no one claims them, staff record the death under a number, alongside all the information they were able to gather.
Any distinguishing marks that may help with later identification, whether personal items or a birthmark, are collected and photographed.
Central registry
Gaza’s health ministry has issued several statements setting out its procedures for compiling the death toll.
In public hospitals under the direct supervision of the territory’s Hamas government, the “personal information and identity number” of every Palestinian killed during the war are entered in the hospital’s database as soon as they are pronounced dead.
The data is then sent to the health ministry’s central registry on a daily basis.
For those who die in private hospitals and clinics, their information is taken down on a form that must be sent to the ministry within 24 hours to be added to the central registry, a ministry statement said.
The ministry’s “information centre” then verifies the data entries to “ensure they do not contain any duplicates or mistakes”, before saving them in the database, the statement added.
Gaza residents are also encouraged by Palestinian authorities to report any deaths in their families on a designated government website. The data is used for the ministry’s verifications.
The ministry is staffed with civil servants that answer to the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority as well as to the Hamas-led government in Gaza.
‘High correlation’
An investigation conducted by Airways, an NGO focused on the impact of war on civilians, analysed the data entries for 3,000 of the dead and found “a high correlation” between the ministry’s data and what Palestinian civilians reported online, with 75% of publicly reported names also appearing on the ministry’s list.
The study found that the ministry’s figures had become “less accurate” as the war dragged on, a development it attributed to the heavy damage to health infrastructure resulting from the war. For instance, at southern Gaza’s Nasser Hospital, one of the few still at least partly functioning, only 50 out of 400 computers still work, its director Atef al-Hout told AFP.
The press office of Gaza’s Hamas government estimates that nearly 70% of the roughly 40,000 people Israel has killed are women (about 11,000) or children (at least 16,300).
Several UN agencies, including the agency in charge of Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), have said the ministry’s figures are credible. UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini said in October:
In the past -the five, six cycles of conflict in the Gaza Strip – these figures were considered as credible and no one ever really challenged these figures.
In fact, a study by British medical review The Lancet estimated that 186,000 deaths can be attributed to the war in Gaza, directly or indirectly as a result of the humanitarian crisis it has triggered.
The Lancet also estimated that the death toll will likely be higher from what it calls “indirect deaths”:
The total death toll is expected to be large given the intensity of this conflict; destroyed health-care infrastructure; severe shortages of food, water, and shelter; the population’s inability to flee to safe places; and the loss of funding to UNRWA, one of the very few humanitarian organisations still active in the Gaza Strip.
Hidden deaths, thanks to Israel
Israel have continued to target hospitals over the past few months. Naturally, this has devastated the already severely reduced capacity of health professionals to respond to the sheer numbers of dead people. Thousands more people are trapped under rubble, with their bodies yet to be recovered. The UNRWA has said it would take up to 15 years and many hundreds of millions to clear all the rubble.
Ralph Nader wrote in Common Dreams:
Just like the entire mass media, many governments, even the independent media and critics of the war would have us accept that between 98% and 99% of Gaza’s entire population has survived—albeit the sick, injured, and more Palestinians about to die. This is lethally improbable!
Even in death, Palestinians know no justice and no peace. Each of those bodies trapped under the rubble, people dying from disease and malnutrition, people dying while running to shelter, had hopes, dreams, aspirations. Now, such is the behemoth of the Israeli genocide and the Western support behind it, those people are forgotten by the West even in death.
Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse
Featured image via YouTube screenshot/Al Jazeera English
