Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry says more than 10,000 people have been killed since 7 October, but doubt has been cast on the reliability of fatality figures.
An Israeli military spokesman has said the ministry “continuously inflates the number of civilian casualties”. That concern was echoed by US President Joe Biden, who said he has “no confidence” in the figures.
Israel’s fatality figures have not attracted the same scepticism. The Israeli military says that “over 1,400” people were killed by Hamas on 7 October.
Whereas journalists and UN investigators have been able to visit the Israeli villages attacked by Hamas to corroborate the figures, Israel has not allowed observers to enter Gaza since the war began.
Analysts say that even for Gazan journalists, periodic phone and internet outages, widespread fuel shortages and the risk of airstrikes have hindered movement within the territory.
Satellite imagery shows graveyards expanding
Footage posted online shows the rapid expansion of cemeteries in Gaza, where dozens of new, makeshift graves have been dug.
Sky News reporters were able to locate this video, uploaded to Snapchat on 19 October, to a cemetery on the outskirts of Gaza City.
The scale of the conflict and the difficulty of obtaining on-the-ground documentation means that open-source verification can, for now, only provide a partial view of the war’s impact.
‘There’s nothing that would lead us to distrust the numbers’
In the meantime, outside observers are likely to continue relying on Gaza’s ministry of health.
“The ministry of health in Gaza has historically been fairly reliable,” says Emily Tripp, director of Airwars, an organisation specialising in the verification of airstrike casualties. “They know the number of people in hospitals, they’ve got the infrastructure, they’ve got the data.”
In recent Gaza wars, figures published by the ministry of health during the fighting have ended up being broadly in line with those later produced by the UN and Israel Defence Forces.
In response to the questions raised about the reliability of their statistics, the ministry recently published the names and ages of all 6,474 victims who had been identified.
In a recent investigation into an airstrike in Gaza City, Airwars verified the death of surgeon Dr Medhat Saidam and 23 of his family members.
“We were able to find pretty much every one of those names in the ministry of health database,” Tripp says.
Brian Root, a senior quantitative analyst at Human Rights Watch, says the ministry’s figures have “always been comparable” to his own findings.
“There’s nothing that would lead us to distrust the numbers.”
Sky News has also looked at the number of deaths among UN staff, which Mr Root says serves as a “good gut check” on the figures.
The UN says that 89 of its staff in Gaza have been killed, approximately 0.71% of the total.
That’s slightly higher than the death rate for all Gaza residents reported by the ministry of health, which stands at 0.45%.
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