More than 40,000 killed in Israel’s war in Gaza, Health Ministry says

JERUSALEM — More than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip, the local Health Ministry said Thursday — a bleak indicator of the war’s toll even as a full count remained out of reach amid a near-total collapse of the enclave’s health-care system. But the Gaza Health Ministry, which has operated for years under the Hamas-led government, says the majority of the dead are women and children. Displaced Palestinians plead for peace ahead of Gaza cease-fire talks in Qatar on Aug. 15, as the death toll reaches 40,000, the local Health Ministry said. On July 16, however, the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement that about 14,000 militants had been “eliminated or apprehended,” meaning combatants potentially make up less than half of those killed. Advertisement On Thursday, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the IDF spokesman, provided a new number for militant deaths, saying 17,000 had been “eliminated” in Gaza since the start of the war. Over that period, the Gaza Health Ministry reported 1,340 deaths. But Palestinian journalists, first responders, international aid workers and war-casualty watchdogs all say the official death toll in Gaza is probably an undercount, with the chaos of war upending what experts and researchers say was once a robust reporting system for tracking and identifying the dead. After months of bombardment and siege, thousands of bodies are still believed to be buried under the rubble, according to Gaza’s civil defense force. Advertisement Skip to end of carousel How we report on what’s happening in Gaza Like other news organizations, we are not able to report from the ground in Gaza because Israel has denied journalists access to the enclave, with the exception of military embeds. Our reporters and contributors — including journalists from Gaza — talk to residents, doctors and aid workers by phone and text message, corroborating their accounts through multiple sources, visual forensics and other tools. The strain on the system — including attacks on hospitals and the detention of health-care workers — has opened the door for criticism of the Gaza Health Ministry’s tally, despite the fact that its casualty counts from previous wars have been largely corroborated by independent experts and the United Nations. Advertisement The Gaza Health Ministry’s protocol for reporting deaths was “quite reliable” at the start of the war, “which is not to say it captured everything,” said Michael Spagat, an economics professor at the University of London and a researcher on casualties in armed conflict. The majority of the population was displaced, cellphone and internet networks went down, and the IDF divided northern and southern Gaza, making it increasingly difficult for health-care workers to figure out who died, where and when. Still, in a December article in the Lancet, a peer-reviewed medical journal, researchers from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Public Health said that in Gaza, “difficulties obtaining accurate mortality figures should not be interpreted as intentionally misreported data.” Advertisement “The Gaza MoH has historically reported accurate mortality data,” the researchers wrote, adding that they “found no evidence of inflated rates.” In the months since, the ministry has expanded its tally to include vetted cases of people reported dead by family members or local media and has broken down the official toll to include what authorities say is a subset of bodies that are unidentified, or whose identities are only partially confirmed. “The information we have for this conflict is much better than probably all of the most recent high-profile conflicts,” Spagat said, including in Ukraine, Ethiopia, Syria and Sudan, where there are no comparable detailed or publicly available lists of the dead. The researchers compared their findings with the Health Ministry’s list for the same period and found that 75 percent of the names they found and verified online were a match — meaning that other casualties had probably gone uncounted by Gaza health officials, said Airwars director Emily Tripp. The number of deaths excluded from the ministry’s official toll is “probably very high,” she said, but difficult to determine. “We have captured incident after incident where people are killed in their homes, are trapped under rubble for days at a time,” Tripp said. “We are now increasingly finding cases of bodies being identified but we can’t tie them to a specific incident,” Tripp said. – This Summarize was created by Neural News AI (V1). Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/08/15/gaza-death-toll-israel-hamas/