Photo: Bashar Taleb Agence France-Presse The bodies of Gazans handed over to the Palestinians by Israel are about to be buried, on August 5, in Khan Younès.
Youssef Hassouna – Agence France-Presse and Chloé Rouveyrolles-Bazire – Agence France-Presse in Jerusalem
Published at 7:18
- Middle East
In the Gaza Strip, which has been bombed for ten months and largely transformed into a field of ruins, counting the dead is a daily challenge. How does the Hamas government's Health Ministry proceed to establish its toll, now at nearly 40,000 dead? ?
The bodies are identified, either by the elements found on them or by a relative, noted AFP journalists who have visited Gaza hospitals several times.
The personal information of the deceased is then entered into a computerized database of the Palestinian Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip, which lists the name, sex, date of birth and identity card number of the deceased.
When the bodies are not identified — whether they are unrecognizable or no one comes to claim them, entire families sometimes being killed in a strike — the caregivers register it with a number and as much information as they can gather.
Jewelry, watch, phone, birthmarks: any clue is collected and photographed. Two AFP correspondents witnessed how health facilities report to the ministry's system.
“Central register”
In several statements, the Gaza Health Ministry also explained the procedure followed to compile the report.
For so-called “government” hospitals, which are under the Hamas administration in power in Gaza, the “personal information and identity number” of each Palestinian killed during the war are entered into the institution’s computerized database after the body arrives or after their death for the wounded who succumb, according to the ministry.
This data is then transmitted “daily” to the ministry’s “central register of martyrs.”
As for the dead evacuated to private hospitals, their personal information is recorded on a form then sent “within 24” hours to the ministry to be integrated into the central database.
The “information center,” a dedicated department of the ministry, is responsible for verifying the information provided by “government” and private hospitals to “ensure that it does not contain any duplicates or errors,” before registering the names in the database.
Gazans are also invited by the Palestinian authorities to report the loss of a loved one on a website of the Ministry of Health, which uses this data for its verifications.
200% Deposit Bonus up to €3,000 180% First Deposit Bonus up to $20,000The ministry is staffed by officials from both the Palestinian Authority, whose headquarters is in Ramallah, and Hamas, the rival movement that seized power in the Gaza Strip in 2007.
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“Strong correlation”
A survey by the NGO Airwars, which specializes in the impact of wars on civilians, analyzed nearly 3,000 names of people killed and found “a strong correlation between official data […] and what Palestinian civilians reported online — with 75% of the names reported publicly also appearing on the Ministry of Health list.”
The study notes, however, that as the war progressed, the ministry's statistics “became less accurate,” estimating that the damage suffered by the health system had made the task more difficult.
For example, of the 400 computers in Nasser Hospital, one of the last partially operating health facilities in the southern Gaza Strip, only 50 are working, the director, Atef Al-Hout, explained to AFP.
While the Israeli authorities regularly question Hamas statistics that do not detail the number of civilians and fighters killed, suspecting them of being manipulated, the army and the prime minister do not dispute the order of magnitude of the overall toll.
In Gaza, the Hamas government press services estimate that nearly 70% of the approximately 40,000 dead are women (around 11,000) and “children” (at least 16,300).
In Israel, the unprecedented attack by Hamas in the south of the country on October 7, 2023 resulted in the deaths of 1,198 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli data.
Sometimes controversial
The daily reports published by the Hamas Ministry of Health have sometimes been contested, notably by the American president, Joe Biden, who had questioned their credibility at the start of the conflict.
But last March, he spoke of “thousands and thousands” of civilians killed, without further comment on the veracity of the ministry's statistics, which also records the wounded.
The reports are cited by most international organizations, and several UN agencies, including the one in charge of Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), have considered the statistics to be credible.
“In the past, the statistics from the five or six cycles of conflict in the Gaza Strip were considered credible. No one has ever really challenged these data,” UNRWA Director Philippe Lazzarini said in Jerusalem at the end of October.
A study published by the British medical journal The Lancet estimates that 186,000 deaths can be attributed to the ongoing conflict in the Gaza Strip, including indirect causes, such as deaths linked to the health crisis.