LONDON: The Gaza Health Ministry’s casualty figures in the first 17 days of Israel’s assault on the enclave were accurate, a new study has found.
British group Airwars said the Hamas-run ministry had identified 7,000 people in the first few weeks of the conflict killed by Israeli strikes.
It added that its own research, which assessed 350 incidents, had identified 3,000 casualties in the period in question, 75 percent of whom were also identified by the ministry, leading it to believe that the authorities’ reporting was likely to be largely accurate.
Airwars, which works to independently verify the effects of conflicts on civilians, said it used a methodology it also deployed to assess figures from conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, Libya and elsewhere.
It added that there had been far more than 350 incidents in the period in question, and that it would continue to study the conflict, but said it believed that statistics in Gaza had become less accurate as the war dragged on, with widespread destruction in the territory hampering local authorities’ ability to do their jobs.
Emily Tripp, the group’s director, said the rate at which people had died in the conflict’s preliminary stages had stood out.
“We have, per incident, more people dying than we’ve seen in any other campaign,” she told the New York Times. “The intensity is greater than anything else we’ve documented.”
Numerous other international groups and experts have also said the ministry’s data was initially accurate.
Mike Spagat, a professor at Royal Holloway College, University of London, who reviewed Airwars’ findings, told the NYT that the group’s figures “capture a large fraction of the underlying reality” of what Gaza’s authorities reported in the early days of the war.
A study conducted by researchers at Johns Hopkins in the US also found no evidence that the ministry’s data was significantly wrong up until early November.
Researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who analyzed ID numbers from the ministry’s data compiled throughout October, found “no obvious reason” to query it.
But in December, Gaza’s authorities, citing the collapse of infrastructure in the enclave including at hospitals and morgues, announced that they would begin relying on “reliable media sources” for figures on casualties as well as what information could be gleaned on the ground.
The ministry’s most recent figures state that at least 39,000 people have been killed since Israel began its invasion in October.
Israel has frequently queried the ministry’s figures based on its proximity to Hamas. Doubts have also been echoed by Israeli allies in the West, with US President Joe Biden at one stage saying he had “no confidence in the number (of deaths) that the Palestinians are using.” US officials have subsequently said the data is more accurate than initially believed to be.
