The Ministry of Health of Gaza denies manipulating the toll figures for the dead

At the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, Alam Hirzallah resigned itself to a dark task: to record the death of the woman and two children of her mourning cousin.

His family brought the bodies here to an electric rush or a tuk-tuk. They found them in their house in eastern Gaza City after the Israeli bombings hit the family home. Asma Hirzallah, Mayar, 5, and Abdullah, 3, were killed.

“The hospital has requested its complete names and identification numbers,” said Alam, referring to the figures that all Palestinians are given in a population register administered by Israel.

“They gave us an article to confirm that they were martyred and told us to come back for the death certificate. Now we do not know where to go to bury them because the cemeteries are in areas under Israeli control.”

At least 51,266 people have been killed during the 18 months since the Gaza War start, according to the Ministry of Health managed by Hamas, with almost a third of the dead under the age of 18.

Israel has repeatedly challenged the precision of the list of Palestinian deaths – in terms of global numbers, and in particular demographic rupture – affirming that it is used as Hamas propaganda. The figures are cited with the attribution, by the United Nations agencies and largely in the media.

The list does not distinguish between civilians and members of the Palestinian armed groups who are killed during the war, and Israel accused Hamas of inflating the percentages of women and children.

Recently, several media reports have raised questions on the reliability of statistics by highlighting the anomalies between the lists of August and October 2024 and March 2025 of death. Reports focus on how some 3,000 names of people originally identified as deaths have been removed from subsequent revised lists.

A Gazan health official, Zaher al-Wahidi, denied the BBC that the victims had disappeared or that there was a lack of transparency, insisting: “The Ministry of Health works to have specific data with great credibility.

“In each list that is shared, there is a greater verification and revision of the list. We cannot say that the Ministry of Health removes names. This is not a process of deletion, but rather a process of revision and verification.”

So how are the statistics gathered and to what extent are they precise?

Until the first months of this war, the number of people killed in Gaza was calculated from the body who arrived in hospitals – like those of Asma Hirzallah and his children.

Doctors could record data for all deaths in a centralized computer system, which was based in a office of the Ministry of Health at the Al-Shifa Hospital, with a replacement at the Al-Rrandi hospital.

However, as the conditions have become more chaotic and the medical sites have been attacked on several occasions, this method has become less reliable. During the war, Israel said that he targeted hospitals – who protected the status under international law – because Hamas used them to hide its combatants and infrastructure – which the armed group denies.

From the beginning of 2024, Gazan health officials introduced online forms that relatives could use to report their dead or missing relatives.

According to Wahidi, the head of statistics from the Ministry of Health, most of the recently withdrawn names from the official list as part of a new verification process had been initially submitted using these forms. He says that the names that are removed can be added later

“A judicial committee has been set up and he examines all the cases received,” said Wahidi. “To ensure credibility, we check the data so that it is exact.”

During the investigations by the judicial committee, some people died of natural causes – not directly because of the war. When the Gazans die from the lack of medical treatment, malnutrition or hyperthermia, Mr. Wahidi clarifies “these cases are indirect and are not added to the lists”.

Other people were wrongly listed as dead, but were then among thousands of Gazans imprisoned by Israel.

Mr. Wahidi confirms that in August then in October, a total of more than 3,000 names were removed from the list, saying that it was a precautionary measure while waiting for complete checks.

For certain pro-Israeli groups, such as the media Honestreport Watchdog, it was a strong indication of “deliberate manipulation, no honest error”.

There had been a widespread presumption according to which only the verified names were included on the published online lists.

“It seems that they really update the lists more in real time, because more information appears,” said Professor Mike Spagat of the Royal Holloway College, president of all the chiefs of victims, an independent organization for monitoring civil injuries. “We should have considered the previous lists as a little more provisional than I had supposed.”

However, he says that he does not detect any attempt from health officials to mislead and consider changes as “a large cleaning operation”.

He stresses that the latest changes in the list led to a low increase in the percentage of adult men among people killed, against the idea that the original inclusion of the 3000 names was made to try to exaggerate the proportion of women and children.

The Gaza Ministry of Health said that it also recently checked data in its official list of deaths from hospital mortals for errors and omissions.

When the deaths were recorded by friends or neighbors, he said, they often did not know the identification numbers for people killed or their complete names-which include the names of the father and the grandfather. In some cases, it made the bad people who died.

Thousands of bodies that are still under the rubble left by Israeli air strikes, as well as 900 who are not identified, are not currently included in the list of the Ministry of Health, the ministry said.

However, the recent two -month -old ceasefire – which allowed the hundreds of thousands of displaced gas to return to what remained of their house – saw nearly 800 corpses recovered, identified and recorded.

End of January, The BBC filmed workers from the Civil Defense Agency led by Hamas While they began to recover human remains that had been left for months in Wadi Gaza – also known as the Netzarim corridor – after a withdrawal from Israeli forces.

In the absence of DNA tests available in Gaza, each corpse has received a serial number. Long shapes have been filled to record the bones and clothes collected to try to identify the dead.

“We are looking for distinctive personal effects: a watch, a necklace or an earring. When we are looking for the bodies, it is very possible that we can find a driving license or an identity card,” said Sameh Khalifa, who managed the team.

“Even a broken tooth can be a distinctive mark that will help a family recognize a lacking loved one.”

Since the resumption of the military offensive of Israel in Gaza on March 18, the figures killed have increased daily.

Israel periodically estimates the number of Palestinian fighters killed. At the beginning of this year, he assessed that 20,000 members of Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad were among the dead. In mid-April, he said that there had been “more than 100 targeted eliminations” in the last month.

Israel does not provide its figures for civil death to Gaza and has officially challenged any of the names on the list of victims of the Ministry of Local Health.

The war began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas led a cross -border attack against southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people, mainly civilians, and taking around 250 people in captivity to Gaza. Since then, the Israeli army says that 408 of its soldiers have been killed in combat.

International journalists, including the BBC, are blocked by Israel to penetrate Gaza independently, are therefore not able to check the figures on each side.

We are counting strongly on local Palestinian journalists working with us to access the information on fatal attacks – interviewing witnesses as well as the bombs and the hospital mortuary sites to film images, which are shared with us.

Overall, the figures have killed in the last year and a half dwarf those of the previous cycles of fights in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict old decades and yet, for the moment, there is no end for the war.