LONDON: The death toll from Gaza's Ministry of Health in the first 17 days of Israel's offensive on the territory is accurate, according to a new study.
The British group Airwars said the Hamas-run ministry had identified 7,000 people in the first few weeks of the war killed by Israeli strikes.
He added that his own research, which evaluated 350 cases, found 3,000 people who lost their lives in the specified period, 75 percent of them were also identified by the ministry, making them believe that the reports made by the authorities may be generally correct.
Airwars, which works to independently verify the impact of conflict on civilians, said it also used a methodology it developed to estimate figures from conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, Libya and somewhere else.
They added that there were more than 350 cases in the period in question, and that the study of the conflict will continue, but they said that the statistics in Gaza became less accurate as the fighting continued, with the destruction spreading in the region. territory that hinders the ability of local authorities to do their work.
Emily Tripp, the group's director, said the death rate was remarkable in the early stages.
“There are, in every case, more people killed than we've seen in other campaigns,” he told the New York Times. “The intensity is greater than anything else we've recorded.”
Many other international groups and experts also said that the ministry's document was initially correct.
Mike Spagat, a professor at Royal Holloway College, University of London, who reviewed the Airwars findings, told the NYT that he “gets a lot of ground truth” from what was reported by authorities in Gaza in the first days of the war the face of the group.
An investigation by researchers at Johns Hopkins in the United States also found no evidence that the ministry's data until early November was completely wrong.
Researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who analyzed ID numbers from ministry data collected during October, found “no clear reason” to question it.
But in December, Gaza authorities announced, citing the collapse of infrastructure in the surrounding area, including hospitals and morgues, that they would begin relying on “resources they can be trusted” in the casualty figures as well as any information that can be gathered on the ground.
The ministry's latest figures say at least 39,000 have been killed since Israel's occupation began in October.
Israel has often questioned the ministry's character because of its closeness to Hamas. Skepticism was also echoed by Israel's Western allies, with US President Joe Biden at one stage saying he “doesn't trust the number (of deaths) used by the Palestinians”. US officials later said the data was more accurate than first believed.
