LONDON: A new study has found that casualty figures provided by Gaza’s Health Ministry in the first 17 days of Israel’s attack on the enclave were accurate.
The British group Airwars said the Hamas-run ministry had identified 7,000 people killed by Israeli strikes in the first weeks of the conflict.
He added that his own research, which assessed 350 incidents, identified 3,000 victims in the period in question, 75 percent of whom were also identified by the ministry, leading him to believe that the authorities' accounts were likely largely accurate.
Airwars, which independently verifies the effects of conflict on civilians, said it used a methodology it has already used to assess data from conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, Libya and elsewhere.
He added that there had been well over 350 incidents during the period in question and that he would continue to study the conflict, but said he believed that statistics on Gaza had become less accurate as the war dragged on, with widespread destruction across the territory hampering the ability of local authorities to carry out their work.
Emily Tripp, the group's director, said the death rate in the early stages of the conflict was significant.
“We have, by accident, more people dying than we’ve seen in any other campaign,” he told The New York Times. “The intensity is greater than anything we’ve documented.”
Several other international groups and experts have also said that the ministry's data was initially accurate.
Mike Spagat, a professor at the University of London's Royal Holloway College, who reviewed Airwars' findings, told the NYT that the group's data “captures a large fraction of the underlying reality” of what Gaza authorities were reporting in the early days of the war.
A study by researchers at Johns Hopkins in the United States also found no evidence that the ministry's data was significantly in error until early November.
Researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who analysed identification numbers from ministry data collected in October, found “no obvious reason” to question them.
But in December, Gaza authorities, citing the collapse of infrastructure in the enclave, including hospitals and morgues, announced they would begin relying on “reliable media sources” for casualty figures and information they could gather on the ground.
According to the ministry's latest figures, at least 39,000 people have been killed since Israel began its invasion in October.
Israel has often disputed the ministry's figures based on its closeness to Hamas. Doubts have also been echoed by Israel's allies in the West, with US President Joe Biden at one point saying he “didn't have confidence in the number (of deaths) that the Palestinians are using.” US officials later said the data was more accurate than initially believed.
