Gaza Ministry of Health denies manipulating death toll

Alam Hirzallah resigned from a grim task at Al-shifa Hospital in Gaza City: the death of his wife and his sad cousin's two children.

His family brought the body to an electric rickshaw or Tuktucker. After Israeli shelling attacked families, they found them in their houses in eastern Gaza. Asma Hirzallah, 5, and Abdullah, 3, were killed.

“The hospital requires their full name and ID number,” Alam explained.

“They gave us a paper to confirm that they were martyred and told us to come back for a death certificate. Now, we don't know where the burial is buried in the area under Israeli control.”

According to Hamas-The Ministry of Operations and Health said at least 51,266 people have been killed in the 18 months since the beginning of the Gaza war, and nearly one-third of the dead are under the age of 18.

Israel has repeatedly challenged the accuracy of the Palestinian death toll list – in terms of totals, especially the population collapse, claiming it was used as Hamas propaganda. The attribution of these figures has been widely cited in the media by UN agencies.

The list did not distinguish between civilians killed in the war and members of Palestinian armed groups, with Israel accusing Hamas of exaggerating the percentage of women and children.

Recently, some media reports raised questions about the reliability of statistical data by highlighting the abnormalities between August 2024 and March 2024 in the death toll list. The focus of the report was on how to remove the names of 3,000 people originally identified as dead from the subsequent revision list.

Gaza health official Zaher al-Wahidi denied that the victims had disappeared or lacked transparency, insisting: “The Ministry of Health is committed to having accurate data with high credibility.

“In each list shared, the list was more validated and revised. We can't say that the Ministry of Health removed the name. This is not a deletion process, but a revision and verification process.”

Verify data

So, how do you collect statistics and their accuracy?

Until the first few months of the war, the number of people in Gaza was still calculated based on the calculation of bodies arriving at the hospital (such as those of Asma Hirzallah and her children).

Medical staff can record all death data into a centralized computer system located in the Ministry of Health of Al-Shifa Hospital and backed up at Al-Rantissi Hospital.

However, as conditions become increasingly chaotic and medical sites are repeatedly attacked, this approach becomes less reliable. During the war, Israel said it targeted hospitals that protected status under international law because Hamas used them to cover up its fighter jets and infrastructure – something armed groups denied.

Starting in early 2024, Gaza health officials have submitted online forms where relatives can use them to report their relatives’ deaths or disappearances.

Wahidi, head of statistics at the Ministry of Health, said that most names were recently submitted using these forms as part of the new inspection process, and recently removed from the official list. He said the removed name may be added later

“A judicial committee was established to study all the cases received,” Vahidi said. “To ensure credibility, we verify that the data will be accurate.”

In the investigation by the Judiciary Committee, it was found that some people died of natural causes – not directly due to war. When Gazans died from lack of medical care, malnutrition or high temperature treatment, Mr Wahidi clarified: “These conditions are indirect and will not be added to the list.”

Others were wrongly listed as dead but were later found among the thousands of Gaza people imprisoned in Israel.

Mr Wahidi confirmed that in August and October, more than 3,000 names were removed from the list, saying it was a precautionary measure, awaiting a full check.

For certain pro-Israeli groups, such as media regulators, reporting honestly, this is a strong sign of “deliberate manipulation, not honest error.”

There is a broad presumption that only the check name is included in the online list.

“It seems like they are actually actually updating the list in real time because more information comes out,” said Professor Mike Spagat of Royal Holloway College, who chairs the Consultalty Counts, an independent civilian casualty monitoring organization. “We should think the previous list is a little more than I thought.”

But, he said, he found that health officials did not try to mislead their leadership and considered the changes to be “large-scale cleanup operations.”

He noted that the latest modifications on the list resulted in a small increase in the percentage of adult males among the victims, opposing the idea that people who initially included more than 3,000 names were intended to exaggerate the proportion of women and children.

Body under rubble

Gaza's Ministry of Health said it also recently reviewed data from the official death list of hospital mortgages due to errors and omissions.

It says that when friends or neighbors register to die, they often don't know the ID number of the killed or full name – including the names of their father and grandfather. In some cases, this leads to the wrong person being marked as dead.

The ministry said it is not yet listed on the Ministry of Health’s list, and thousands of bodies are still under Israeli air strikes and about 900 rubble.

But the ceasefire in the last two months has allowed hundreds of thousands of displaced Gaza people to return to what remains of their houses – nearly 800 bodies have been found to be retrieved, identified and registered.

In late January, the BBC filmed Hamas-Civil Defense Agency workers who set out to retrieve human remains, which had been months left in Wadi Gaza (also known as the Netzarim Corridor) after pulling by Israeli forces.

In the absence of DNA tests in Gaza, each carcasses have a serial number. Filled with long forms to record the collected bones and clothes in an attempt to identify the dead.

“We look for unique personal items: watches, necklaces or earrings. When we search for bodies, it's very likely that we will find a driver's license or ID card.”

“Even a tooth fracture can be a clear trace and it will help a family get to know a missing loved one.”

Deaths of combatants

The number of deaths has increased every day since the Israeli military offensive in Gaza resumed on March 18.

Israel regularly estimates the number of Palestinian fighters killed. At the beginning of the year, it assessed 20,000 dead in Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad members. In mid-April, it said that “more than 100 targets have been eliminated” in the past month.

Israel has not provided numbers for civilian deaths in Gaza, nor has it formally questioned any names on the local health ministry's casualties list.

The war began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas led a cross-border attack on southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and imprisoning about 250 people in Gaza. Since then, the Israeli military said 408 of its soldiers were killed in the fight.

International journalists, including the BBC, were blocked by Israel from entering Gaza independently, and therefore could not verify the figures from either side.

We rely heavily on local Palestinian journalists we work with to access information about the deadly attacks – interviewing witnesses, visiting the collateral of bomb sites and hospitals to capture footage shared with us.

Overall, the number of people killed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the last year and a half of the dwarves has been killed in decades of fighting, but for the moment, there is no end to the war.