US President Joe Biden has disputed the casualty figures provided by Palestinian officials in Gaza, but international humanitarian organizations consider them broadly accurate and historically reliable.

While there is no dispute that Israeli attacks on Gaza have claimed many lives since Hamas invaded southern Israel on October 7, Biden said yesterday, Wednesday, that he has “no confidence in the numbers that the Palestinians,” without specifying why.

The health ministry in Hamas-controlled Gaza responded by giving publicity a 212 page document with the names and ID numbers of some 7,000 Palestinians it says have been killed in Israeli shelling of the enclave.

International organizations, even some operating in Gaza, and international media, including Reuters, are unable to cross-reference the numbers but journalists have seen a large number of bodies.

The UN and other international organizations say there may be slight discrepancies between the final death tolls and those reported by the health ministry in Gaza. immediately after the attacks, but that they generally trust them.

“We continue to include their details in our reports and the sources are clearly stated,” the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) noted in a statement to Reuters. “It is almost impossible at the moment to provide any verification from the UN on a daily basis.”

The head of the UN agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA), Filipe Lazzarini, said today at a press conference in Jerusalem that as in the previous wars in Gaza, the reports given by the Hamas authorities exercising power in Gaza, “they are considered reliable and no one has ever really questioned them».

Dr. Mike Ryan, head of the Health Emergencies Management Program at the World Health Organization in Geneva, said the figures released by both sides “may not be completely accurate minute-by-minute, but they generally reflect the level of deaths and injuries on both sides of the conflict.”

The organization Human Rights Watchbased in New York, also maintains that the casualty figures are generally reliable, and that it has not detected major discrepancies when cross-referencing previous attacks in Gaza.

“It’s worth noting that the numbers coming out after October 7 are generally consistent with, or within reason for, the scale of casualties that one would expect given the intensity of the shelling in such a densely populated area,” said Omar Sakri, Israel’s top official. and Palestine at Human Rights Watch. “These numbers are in line with what one would expect given what we are seeing on the ground through testimonies, satellite imagery and other media“, he told Reuters.

THE ELEMENTS IN GENERAL LINES MATCH

In a development that highlights the difficulties in counting the dead, a World Health Organization official said today that the UN agency has received estimates that about 1,000 unidentified bodies remain buried under rubble in Gaza and have not yet been included in the death toll. The official did not specify the source of this estimate.

While Hamas controls Gaza and exercises tight control over information coming out of the enclave, official responsibility for the health ministry continues to rest with the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority is dominated by Fatah, Hamas’s arch-rival, and is responsible for paying salaries and providing equipment to Gaza’s hospitals. It reports casualties based on numbers it receives from hospitals, ambulances and emergency services, in coordination with the Red Crescent, a spokesman in Ramallah said.

He said the victims are initially identified based on age, gender and type of injury while their full details are then confirmed. Those numbers initially refer to Gaza and are updated in Ramallah after being cross-referenced, but the discrepancies are generally small, he said.

There has not been much change in the way the Palestinian Authority reports the number of casualties since the last major conflict between Israel and Hamas in 2014, when the numbers given by different entities did not vary widely.

In a report published on its website on November 3, 2015, the Palestinian Ministry of Health stated that the number of people killed in the July-August 2014 conflict in Gaza was 2,322.

A UN 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 post-conflict report that 2,125 Palestinians had been killed in Gazaaccording to data collected by the Israeli military.

The Israeli institute Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs said that over 2,100 Palestinians were killed while the human rights organization B’tselem spoke of 2,202 Palestinians.

ISRAELI CONCERNS

Israel attacks Gaza after Hamas raids in southern Israel, where according to the Israeli authorities 1,400 people were killed. Biden, speaking at a press conference, did not explain Wednesday why he does not trust the Palestinian casualty figures.

An Israeli military spokesman said this week that the health ministry in Gaza “constantly inflates the number of civilian casualties” and that it “has been caught lying in the past.” He cited the ministry’s handling of the Oct. 17 attack on Al-Ahli Al-Arabi hospital in Gaza, which each side blames on the other, saying the ministry initially reported 500 dead but later revised the number down to 471. In separate briefing to reporters, another spokesman did not give an Israeli estimate of casualties when asked what Israel estimates the total number to be.

According to an unclassified US intelligence reportaccessed by Reuters, the death toll in the hospital attack was “probably on the low end of the 100 to 300 range”. An Israeli official has stated that the death toll appears to be “several dozen”.

Palestinian officials said counting the dead in the attack was difficult because some victims were dismembered, meaning many human parts must be identified.