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Palestinian women grieving in Khan Yunis, Gaza, Thursday. Credit: Bashar Taleb/AFP
Palestinian women grieving in Khan Yunis, Gaza, Thursday. Credit: Bashar Taleb/AFP
Israel’s eventual acceptance of the Gaza Health Ministry’s reported death toll should come as no surprise. Though Israeli officials heavily scrutinized the figures at the war’s start, no prominent Israeli spokesman has disputed them for several months.
The debate on the ministry’s credibility exists almost solely on social media and in Israeli mainstream media. Every single government, nonprofit organization and scholar who deals with Gaza accepts the ministry’s data and considers it very reliable.
To understand why the Health Ministry’s reports are reliable, we must first ask which contradictory information exists. But there are no contradictory reports. The most recent war in Gaza, which began on October 7, 2023, is the first war in Israeli history in which the IDF did not publish any official data on casualties from the opposing side.
The Gaza Health Ministry, meanwhile, published not only the overall death toll, but also compiled a detailed list of the majority of the dead, including their full names, the names of their fathers and grandfathers, dates of birth and identification numbers.