The health ministry in Hamas-controlled Gaza has published a report listing the names of more than 6,000 \u201cdocumented deaths\u201d in Gaza since the October 7 terror attacks on Israel, after US President Joe Biden questioned the reliability of Palestinian casualty figures. <\/p>\n
The report stated that between October 7 and 26, 7,028 Palestinians were killed, including 2,913 children, and blamed the deaths on Israeli military \u201caggression.\u201d It said a further 281 bodies had not yet been identified. <\/p>\n
The\u00a0ministry\u00a0said the actual number of dead is likely to be much higher than stated in the report.\u00a0The list of 6,747 names gives the sex, age and identity card number of each of the victims \u2013 an apparent effort to bolster the credibility of its data in the face of challenges from the US and Israel. <\/p>\n
On Wednesday,\u00a0Biden\u00a0said he had \u201cno confidence\u201d in the ministry\u2019s casualty figures. On Thursday, White House spokesman John Kirby called the\u00a0ministry\u00a0\u201ca front for Hamas,\u201d\u00a0though when asked he did not dispute that thousands of Palestinians, including many innocent civilians, had been killed. <\/p>\n
The dispute highlights the complexities in reporting the number of deaths in Gaza. Numbers of casualties for the besieged enclave are released daily, both by the ministry in Gaza and by the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah in the West Bank. <\/p>\n
The Palestinian Authority is run by a rival faction to Hamas,\u00a0though the umbrella Ministry of Health maintains a relationship with the ministry in Gaza. <\/p>\n
The Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority, Mohammad Shtayyeh, criticized\u00a0Biden\u2019s\u00a0remarks, saying his health authority in the West Bank believed the Gaza numbers to be accurate. <\/p>\n
\u201cThere are certain leaders who don\u2019t want to see reality. They only want to see what is happening on the Israeli side. They don\u2019t want to see what is happening on the Palestinian side,\u201d he said in an interview Thursday with Al Jazeera. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe numbers are correct,\u201d he added. \u201cThey are our numbers. These numbers are fed to us from the hospitals of\u00a0Gaza\u00a0every single day that are received by our\u00a0Ministry\u00a0of\u00a0Health.\u201d <\/p>\n
Last week Michael Ryan, the executive director of WHO\u2019s health emergencies programme, told reporters: \u201cWe believe that the numbers being reported in Israel and in the occupied Palestinian territories\u2026 may not be perfectly accurate on a minute-to-minute basis but they grossly reflect the level of death and injury on both sides of that conflict.\u201d <\/p>\n
Numbers provided by the Gaza health ministry have not historically been controversial and have been cited in reports by the US State Department without caveats over their accuracy. <\/p>\n
But the current conflict has drawn closer attention onto international reliance on the figures, and <\/strong>conflicting claims over the number of people who died in the explosion at al-Ahli Arab\u00a0Hospital\u00a0in\u00a0Gaza\u00a0City on October 17 have deepened the dispute. The ministry put the final tally at 471. An initial US intelligence assessment was that between 100 and 300 were likely killed in the blast. Other analysts have said the number could be significantly lower, in double figures, based on the size of the impact crater at the site. <\/p>\n Kirby noted that the ministry initially reported 500 people had died in what it claimed was an Israeli air strike. <\/p>\n \u201cSo, we know that\u2019s not true, and we\u2019ve now since found out that the numbers aren\u2019t that high, either,\u201d he said. \u201cThey haven\u2019t gotten up to 500 \u2013 now it was it was at least a couple of hundred, and that\u2019s terrible, and that\u2019s atrocious, and that\u2019s sad, and we all obviously grieve with the families and loved ones who are affected by that, but the numbers are not reliable.\u201d <\/p>\n The Israeli military has similarly expressed doubts about the casualty numbers being reported out of\u00a0Gaza, but has not provided evidence that they are exaggerated. <\/p>\n Thursday\u2019s report from Gaza said it excludes those buried without being brought to hospital, those for whom hospitals were unable to complete registration procedures, and people missing under the rubble, who number around 1,600, with many of them feared dead. <\/p>\n\n The health ministry in Hamas-controlled Gaza has published a report listing the names of more than 6,000 \u201cdocumented deaths\u201d in Gaza since the October 7 terror attacks on Israel, after US President Joe Biden questioned the reliability of Palestinian casualty figures. The report stated that between October 7 and 26, 7,028 Palestinians were killed, including <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":10780,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-10779","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10779\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}