Despite Biden's doubts, humanitarian agencies consider Gaza toll
reliable
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[October 27, 2023]
By Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber
GENEVA (Reuters) - U.S. President Joe Biden has cast doubt on casualty
figures provided by Palestinian officials in Gaza, but international
humanitarian agencies consider them broadly accurate and historically
reliable.
Although there is no dispute that Israeli attacks on Gaza have killed
many people since Hamas ran amok in southern Israel on Oct. 7, Biden
said on Wednesday he had "no confidence in the number 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 identity numbers of around
7,000 Palestinians it said had been killed in the Israeli bombardment of
the enclave.
International groups, even some operating in Gaza, and global media
including Reuters are not able to verify the figures but reporters have
seen large numbers of bodies.
U.N. and other international agencies say there can be small
discrepancies between the final casualty numbers and those reported by
the Gaza health ministry straight after attacks, but that they broadly
trust them.
"We continue to include their data in our reporting and it is clearly
sourced," the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)
said in a statement to Reuters.
"It is nearly impossible at the moment to provide any UN verification on
a day-to-day basis."
Dr Mike Ryan, Executive Director of the Geneva-based World Health
Organization's Health Emergencies Programme, said last week figures
released by both sides "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."
New York-based Human Rights Watch also says the casualty figures have
generally been reliable, and that it has not found big discrepancies in
its verification of past strikes on Gaza.
"It's worth noting that the numbers that are coming out since October
7th are generally consistent or within logic for the scale of killings
one would expect, given the intensity of bombardment in such a densely
populated area," Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine Director at Human
Rights Watch, said.
"Those numbers are in line with what one might expect, given what we're
seeing on the ground through testimony, through satellite imagery and
otherwise," he told Reuters.
FIGURES BROADLY ALIGN
Underlining the difficulties in calculating death tolls, a World Health
Organization official said on Friday the agency had received estimates
that some 1,000 unidentified bodies were still buried under the rubble
in Gaza and not yet included in death tolls. The official did not
specify the source.
While Hamas controls Gaza and exercises tight control over information
coming out of the enclave, formal responsibility for the health ministry
still rests with the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank.
The PA is dominated by Fatah, the main Palestinian rival to Hamas, and
is responsible for paying salaries and providing equipment to Gaza
hospitals.
It reports casualty totals based on numbers it receives from hospitals,
ambulances and emergency services, in coordination with the Red
Crescent, a spokesman in Ramallah said.
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Palestinians search for casualties at the site of Israeli strikes on
houses, as the conflict between Israel and Palestinian Islamist
group Hamas continues, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip,
October 26, 2023. REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa
He said victims are initially identified by age, sex and injury
type, and full identities are confirmed later. The figures are
initially reported in Gaza, and updated in Ramallah after they have
been checked, but discrepancies are generally minimal, he said.
Israel has not provided its own estimated death toll.
There has been no big change in the way Palestinian authorities
report casualties since the last big conflict between Israel and
Hamas in 2014, when figures provided by various entities were not
vastly different.
In a report published on its website on Nov. 3, 2015, the
Palestinian health ministry said the number of people killed in the
July-August 2014 conflict in Gaza was 2,322.
A U.N.-mandated commission of inquiry reported that 2,251
Palestinians had been killed.
Although Israel blamed Hamas for the majority of the deaths in Gaza,
the Israeli Foreign Ministry said in a report following the conflict
that 2,125 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza, according to data
gathered 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 that figure at 2,202 Palestinians.
ISRAELI CONCERN
Israel has been attacking Gaza since cross-border raids in which it
said 1,400 people were killed by Hamas in southern Israel. Biden,
who was speaking at a press conference, did not explain on Wednesday
why he lacked confidence in the casualty figures provided by the
Palestinians.
An Israeli military spokesman said this week the Gaza health
ministry "continuously inflates the number of civilian casualties"
and "has been caught lying in the past".
He cited the ministry's handling of an attack at Al-Ahli al-Arabi
Hospital in Gaza on Oct. 17 which each side blamed on the other,
saying the ministry initially reported 500 dead but later revised
the toll down to 471. In a separate media briefing, another
spokesman gave no Israeli casualty estimate when asked by reporters
what Israel assessed the overall total to be.
An unclassified U.S. intelligence report seen by Reuters estimated
the death toll in the hospital attack was "probably at the low end
of the 100 to 300 spectrum". An Israeli official has said the toll
appears to be "several dozen".
Palestinian officials said calculating the number of dead in the
attack had been difficult because some victims were dismembered,
meaning there were many body parts to identify.
(Reporting by Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber in Geneva, James Mackenzie
in Jerusalem, Edmund Blair in Beirut and by Gaza, Ramallah and
Washington newsroooms, Editing by Timothy Heritage and Angus MacSwan)
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