GENEVA, Oct 27 (Reuters) – U.S. President Joe Biden has cast doubt on casualty figures provided by Palestinian officials in Gaza, but international aid agencies consider them generally accurate and historically reliable.
While there is no dispute that Israeli attacks on Gaza have killed many people since Hamas rampaged through southern Israel on Oct. 7, Biden said Wednesday that he “has no confidence in the numbers that the Palestinians are using,” without saying why.
The health ministry in Hamas-controlled Gaza responded by releasing a 212-page document containing the names and identification numbers of some 7,000 Palestinians it said had been killed in the Israeli bombardment of the enclave.
International groups, even some operating in Gaza, and the global media, including Reuters, have been unable to verify the numbers, but reporters have seen a large number of bodies.
The UN and other international agencies say there may be small discrepancies between the final death toll and those reported by Gaza’s health ministry immediately after the attacks, but that they are generally trusted.
“We continue to include their data in our reports and it is clearly sourced,” the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a statement to Reuters.
“Right now it’s almost impossible to provide any kind of verification from the UN on a day-to-day basis.”
Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the Geneva-based World Health Organization’s Health Emergencies Program, said last week’s figures released by both countries “may not be perfectly accurate on a minute-by-minute basis, but in general lines reflect the level of death and injury on both sides of this conflict.”
New York-based Human Rights Watch also said the casualty figures were generally reliable and that they had found no major discrepancies when checking past strikes on Gaza.
“It is worth noting that the numbers coming out since October 7 are generally consistent or within the logic of the scale of killing that can be expected given the intensity of the bombing in such a densely populated area,” Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch, said.
“These numbers are in line with what would be expected given what we are seeing on the ground through testimony, through satellite imagery and otherwise,” he told Reuters.
FIGURES LINED WIDELY
Underscoring the difficulty of calculating the death toll, a World Health Organization official said on Friday that the agency had received estimates that about 1,000 unidentified bodies were still buried under the rubble in Gaza and were not yet included in the death toll. The official did not identify the source.
While Hamas controls Gaza and exercises tight control over information coming out of the enclave, official responsibility for the health ministry still rests with the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank.
Palestinians search for victims at the site of Israeli strikes on houses as conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas continues, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, October 26, 2023. REUTERS/Ibrahim Abu Mustafa License Rights
The PA is dominated by Fatah, Hamas’ main Palestinian rival, and is responsible for paying salaries and providing equipment for Gaza’s hospitals.
It reports the total number of casualties based on numbers it receives from hospitals, ambulances and emergency services, in coordination with the Red Crescent, a spokesman in Ramallah said.
He said victims were initially identified by age, gender and type of injury, with full identities confirmed later. Figures are initially reported in Gaza and updated in Ramallah after they are verified, but discrepancies are generally minimal, he said.
Israel has not given its estimated death toll.
There has been little change in the way the Palestinian Authority reports casualties since the last major conflict between Israel and Hamas in 2014, when figures provided by different entities do not vary significantly.
In a report published on its website on November 3, 2015, the Palestinian Ministry of Health said the number of people killed in the July-August 2014 conflict in Gaza was 2,322.
A UN-mandated commission of inquiry reported that 2,251 Palestinians were killed.
Although Israel blamed Hamas for most of the deaths in Gaza, the Israeli Foreign Ministry said in a post-conflict report that 2,125 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza, according to figures compiled by the Israeli military.
The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, an Israeli think tank, said more than 2,100 Palestinians were killed, while rights groups B’tselem put the figure at 2,202 Palestinians.
ISRAELI CONCERN
Israel attacked Gaza after cross-border attacks in which it said 1,400 people were killed by Hamas in southern Israel. Biden, speaking at a press conference, did not explain Wednesday why he did not believe the casualty figures provided by the Palestinians.
An Israeli military spokesman said this week that the Gaza health ministry “constantly increases the number of civilian casualties” and “has been caught in a lie in the past”.
He cited the ministry’s handling of the Oct. 17 attack on Al-Ahli al-Arabi hospital in Gaza, which each side blamed on the other, saying the ministry initially reported 500 dead but later revised bringing the death toll to 471. In a separate media briefing, another spokesman did not give an estimate of Israeli casualties when asked by reporters what Israel’s estimate of the total was.
An unclassified US intelligence report seen by Reuters estimated the death toll in the hospital attack was “probably at the lower end of the spectrum of 100 to 300”. An Israeli official said the casualties appeared to be “several dozen”.
Palestinian officials said calculating the death toll in the attack was difficult because some victims had been dismembered, meaning there were many body parts to identify.
Reporting by Gabriel Tetreau-Farber in Geneva, James McKenzie in Jerusalem, Edmund Blair in Beirut and from newsrooms in Gaza, Ramallah and Washington Editing by Timothy Heritage and Angus McSwan
Our standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
