Palestinian Ministry of Health’s mortality figures in Gaza are trustworthy: Here’s why
A report by a British thinktank lamented that the world media cite the mortality figures published by the Palestinians and not what Israel publishes. But a comparison of the quality of the data published by both sides clearly tilts the scales in favour of the Palestinians
By Lee Mordechai* • Translated by Sol Salbe
Two weeks ago, a report was published by a British Think Tank called the Henry Jackson Society (hereinafter HJS) [named after the late US Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson -tr], which questioned the death count by the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza. Although outside of Israel most of the serious media chose to ignore the report, which was clearly biased in favour of Israel, it received extensive coverage in mainstream Israeli newspapers (Ynet, Maariv, Makor Rishon).
The think tank in question is considered particularly political. One of its founders — who had severed ties with it — declared a few years ago that the institution had become a far-right, deeply anti-Muslim racist organisation,” and mentioned a case in which it was revealed that the Japanese government paid the think tank about 10,000 pounds sterling a month to run a propaganda campaign against China. In another case, it was discovered that the British Home Office transferred funds to the HJS, which in turn transferred some of it to right-wing conservative politicians with ties to Israel or pro-Israel organisations. The think tank has rarely dealt with Israel in recent years, and most recently dealt with Gaza in 2014. Despite these many problems, Israeli media portrayed the HJS to the public as legitimate and even as a “prestigious British research institute.”
The report itself actually includes two different contentions. Firstly, that Palestinian mortality estimates are untrustworthy; Secondly, that international media outlets quote the Palestinian Ministry of Health’s mortality estimates, and not those provided by Israel. I will address each one of those in turn here.
There is a general consensus in the international discourse that the mortality estimates coming from the Palestinian Ministry of Health are trustworthy. This trustworthiness stems mainly from the fact that the mortality lists that the Ministry publishes every few months include demographic details of all the identified deaths (name, ID number, gender, age). This information is easily refutable, as Israel has an up-to-date copy of the population registry in Gaza, as well as many means of tracking and monitoring the population there. Israel has an interest in refuting these figures, but even though the refutation would be an easy task to carry out, it has chosen not to do so.
In practice, Israel admitted that at least 83 per cent of the people who appeared on the first list, published by the Palestinian Ministry of Health back in October 2023, were real. The IDF Spokesperson later chose not to respond to questions on the matter. The person in charge of information in the Palestinian Ministry of Health has provided the international media with a detailed methodology regarding how the information was collected and examined. It should be noted that mortality estimates from the Palestinian Ministry of Information and Hamas are significantly less reliable, as they do not include details that can be refuted or corroborated and suffer from a clear bias.
It is actually the very detailed annotation provided by the Palestinian Ministry of Health about the methodology it uses that illustrate the difficulties in collecting and verifying data during the war: the data management system crashed, and employees were forced to document the fatalities by hand; The employees of the ministry and the ministry itself were evacuated from their premises several times; And hospitals were unable to cope with the burden of casualties and the physical attacks on them, and were forced to delegate the authority to register the dead to officials without proper accreditation.
In such a situation, it is clear that mistakes will be made in collecting information and making it accessible. The big question is how common and/or tendentious these mistakes are. To the credit of the Palestinian Ministry of Health, its employees are trying to improve the quality of the information. After a slight decline in the quality of their lists in the [northern] winter–spring of 2024, there has been a significant improvement since the summer. Experts on the subject have even praised the ministry’s work, and some of those who have criticised its work over the past year have also admitted that its employees have taken on board some of the criticism they have received.
HJS’s report chooses not to provide its own data on Palestinian fatalities, limiting itself instead to trying to undermine the existing data. The first fundamental problem with the report, which was released in early December 2024, is its reliance on an outdated list from the end of August. There is no mention in the report of the updated and expanded list published in early October, which significantly reduced the uncertainty in the data. In comparison, the list from the end of August includes 34,344 names (out of about 40,534 fatalities at the time of publication, ie, about 85 per cent), while the list from October includes 40,717 names (out of about 42,010 fatalities at the time of publication, ie, about 97 per cent). If the authors of the report at HJS were aware of the new list and chose not to refer to it, there is a serious ethical problem here. If they were not aware of the new list, there is a serious professional problem here.
The HJS report highlights errors in the reports of the Palestinian Ministry of Health, although it admits that some of them were corrected in later lists. It includes listing the wrong age of the deceased, and the wrong record of the deceased’s gender. These errors take up a great deal of space and fill up the text of the report, but the total number of errors — according to the HJS report — is negligible, less than one per cent of the Ministry of Health’s mortality estimates. In most cases, the report cites cases of mistakes in the age of two people, the inclusion of a child shot by Hamas in the fatality list, or three people who were registered as dead and also appeared on the Health Ministry’s list of cancer patients in need of treatment, but it does not provide numbers that would indicate the extent of the problem.
Even where the report does provide numbers — 103 men whose gender is listed as “female” and a change in the age of 284 from 19 to 18 in the report later — no context is given. In response to the report, another organisation, Action on Armed Violence (AOAV), conducted a sample test of 20,000 names, and found 116 names with a gender that is apparently incorrect, which is about half a per cent: 67 men who were mistakenly registered as women and 49 women who were mistakenly registered as men.
The HJS report argues that the Palestinian Ministry of Health included natural mortality in the mortality lists (in previous years, more than 5,000 deaths were recorded annually in the Gaza Strip) but does not provide support for this contention other than the three cancer patients mentioned above (the AOAV found a total of 12 such examples). The Palestinian Ministry of Health explicitly stated that the lists include only people killed from direct operations in the war. Indeed, an anecdotal test I conducted shows that children who died of malnutrition, for example, are not included in the report. The Ministry of Health employee also said that the ministry is working on a report on excess mortality, which is supposed to come out at the end of the year but has not yet been published.
Furthermore, if natural mortality were included in the report, we would expect to see a significant increase in infant mortality of both sexes, as this is a weaker population whose chances of dying of natural death are higher, as is clearly reflected in the death from malnutrition in a series of cases published in the spring of 2024. In practice, the HJS report shows a higher mortality rate among young men, a phenomenon that is expected in the context of combat.
The British report claims that it is impossible to know whether Gazans killed by failed Hamas rocket fire are included in Palestinian mortality estimates. This is a weak argument, as acceptance of which would necessitates discounting victims of friendly fire and those deliberately killed through the application of the Hannibal Procedure from the Israeli fatality figures. But beyond that, the numbers in question are negligible. In Operation Guardian of the Walls in 2021, 4,340 rockets were fired at Israel, and the Begin-Sadat Institute at Tel Aviv University estimated that about 680 fell inside Gaza, killing about 91 Gazans. Other estimates were lower.
In the current war, Palestinian organisations have fired more than 9,000 rockets from inside the Gaza Strip. According to the HJS report, between 1,000 and 1,750 of them fell inside the Gaza Strip. Based on the 2021 figures, such a number of misfired hits would have caused the death of about 200 Gazans, a negligible number compared to the total Palestinian deaths, more than 45,000, as of this writing.
Regarding the report’s second contention, according to which the mortality figures provided by Israel are ignored around the world, it can be said that the Israeli estimates are inconsistent, out-of-date, and not based on any methodology or evidence that can be verified or disproved, beyond the words of the IDF Spokesperson and sometimes the Prime Minister. The lack of interest on the part of the Israeli government and the security establishment in releasing data to the public leads to the observation that, in fact, since mid-August, the Israeli estimate of terrorists killed in the Gaza Strip has remained at about 17,000, even though in the four months since then, about 5,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
Although the army claimed in September that it had identified 10,000 terrorists among those killed, Israel rarely distributes their names. A UN report indicates that by the end of April, when there were 34,000 Palestinians killed, more than 13,000 of them terrorists according to Israel, Israel had released the names of only 75 Palestinians it claimed to have killed. A BBC investigation from the end of February tried to examine the army’s mortality estimates, which at the time stood at 10,000 terrorists, out of 30,000 Gazans killed.
The investigation reviewed all the reports of the IDF Spokesperson and the 280 videos it had released up to that time. Only one of the videos showed the bodies of armed Hamas fighters, and a few videos showed soldiers firing at armed Palestinians. The investigation found 160 posts with a specific number of gunmen/terrorists killed — a total of 714 fatalities. In 247 other posts, more vague numbers were given, such as “several” terrorists, “dozens” or “hundreds” that could not be counted.
In any case, it seems that there is a wide gap between the military’s claims and the reality on the ground. In Haaretz’s investigation into what was happening in the Netzarim corridor, a senior officer was quoted as saying that while the IDF Spokesperson reported the killing of more than 200 terrorists on a particular day, the army’s examination of the 200 bodies of the division in which he served found that only 10 of them had been verified as known Hamas operatives.
Therefore, in light of the paucity of Israeli documentation, capable of being verified or disproven, it is understandable why the Palestinian Ministry of Health’s estimates of fatalities in Gaza are considered more reliable than those of Israel, and the international media are correct in giving more weight to the Ministry of Health’s estimates.
It is worth noting that the Palestinian Ministry of Health’s mortality estimates are not perfect. They do not include many of the dead who were not brought to hospitals — whether they were killed outside or buried under the rubble. An estimated 10,000 Gazans are buried under the rubble of buildings or in tunnels in the Gaza Strip. It is very possible that the Palestinian Ministry of Health chooses not to report some of the male casualties, especially the armed ones, but we have no way to confirm or refute this hypothesis at this stage.
If the military and the security establishment have well-founded information about Palestinian mortality — of armed men and/or civilians — that is substantially different from the figures of the Palestinian Ministry of Health, they should release it as soon as possible for the benefit of the public.
Dr Lee Mordechai is a senior lecturer in the Department of History at the Hebrew University.
Translated by Sol Salbe, Middle East News Service
שיחה מקומית @mekomit Hebrew original published Dec 30, 2024
