At Gaza Strip, which has been bombarded for ten months and has largely been reduced to ruins, the death count it’s a daily challenge. How does the health ministry of the Hamas government manage to keep its count, which is now approaching 40,000 deaths?

The bodies are identified, either from objects that are on them, or from someone familiar, said AFP journalists who have visited Gaza hospitals many times.

The personal data of the deceased is then entered into an electronic database of the Palestinian Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip, where the deceased’s name, gender, date of birth and identity card number are listed.

In terms bodies that have not been identified – which are unrecognizable or unsearched for, as sometimes the whole family has been killed in a single blow–the health workers record them with a number and as many details as they can gather.

Jewelry, phones, birthmarks: every piece of information is collected and photographed. Two AFP correspondents documented how medical institutions update the ministry’s system.

In several announcements, the Gaza Ministry of Health has also explained the process followed to compile the report.

For the so-called “government” hospitals, run by Hamas, which controls Gaza, the “personal information and identification number” of every Palestinian killed during the war is entered into the institution’s electronic database after he arrives. corpse or after the death of those who succumb to their injuries, according to the ministry.

These data are then sent “daily” to the ministry’s “central witness register”.

When it comes to dead people taken to private hospitals, their personal details are recorded on a form which is then sent “within 24” hours to the ministry to be incorporated into the central database.

The “information centre”, a special agency of the ministry, is tasked with cross-checking the information provided by “government” and private hospitals to “ensure that there are no duplicates or errors” before entering the names into the database.

Residents of Gaza are also asked by the Palestinian authorities to inform about the loss of someone of their own through the website of the Ministry of Health, which uses this data for its intersections.

The ministry is staffed by employees of the Palestinian Authority, whose headquarters are in Ramallah, and of Hamas, the rival movement that took power in 2007 in the Gaza Strip.

Research by NGO Airwars, which specializes in the impact of war on civilians, analyzing nearly 3,000 names of the dead, found “a strong correlation between official data … and what Palestinian citizens report online – 75% of publicly reported names also appear on the list of the Ministry of Health”.

The study notes, however, that during the war, the ministry’s statistics “became less accurate” as damage to the health system made this task more difficult.

For example, of the 400 computers at Nasser Hospital, one of the last partially functioning health facilities in the southern Gaza Strip, only 50 are working, director Atef Al-Hout told AFP.

Although Israeli authorities regularly dispute Hamas statistics that do not give details of the number of civilian and militant casualties, as they suspect they have been falsified, the army and the prime minister do not dispute the scale of the overall toll.

In Gaza, the Hamas government’s press services estimate that about 70% of the nearly 40,000 dead are women (about 11,000) and children (at least 16,300).

In Israel, the unprecedented attack by Hamas in the southern part of the country on 7 October 2023 claimed the lives of 1,198 people, the majority of them civilians, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli figures.

The daily reports published by the Hamas Ministry of Health have sometimes been questioned, as by US President Joe Biden, who expressed reservations about their credibility at the beginning of the conflict. But last March, he spoke of “thousands and thousands” of civilians killed, no longer commenting on the validity of the ministry’s statistics, which also record the wounded.

These accounts are figures cited by the majority of international organizations, and several UN agencies, including the one responsible for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa), consider them reliable.

“In the past, the statistics of five or six rounds of conflict in the Gaza Strip were considered reliable. No one has really challenged this evidence,” said UNRWA chief Philip Lazzarini in Jerusalem in late October.

A study published by the medical journal The Lancet estimated that 186,000 deaths could be attributed to the conflict raging in the Gaza Strip, including indirect deaths such as those related to the crisis in the health system.