GAZA STRIP: With Gaza largely in ruins after more than 10 months of war, the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry has struggled to count the death toll, which on Thursday surpassed 40,000. The Zionist entity has repeatedly questioned the credibility of the daily figures put out by the ministry and US President Joe Biden did so too in the early stages of the war. But several United Nations agencies that operate in Gaza have said the figures are credible and they are frequently cited by international organizations.

Two AFP correspondents witnessed health facilities enter deaths in the ministry’s database. Gaza health officials first identify bodies by visual recognition from a relative or friend, or by recovering personal items. The deceased’s details, including name, gender, birth date and ID number, are then entered in the health ministry’s digital database. Umm Omar told AFP she did not understand “how the months have gone by” since her husband, Ibrahim Al-Shanbari, was killed in a Zionist entity strike on northern Gaza. When he died, Umm Omar said she lost everything “in a fraction of a second”, but there was little time to bury him properly, grieve or process the loss of the “kind” man that he was.

There was no funeral procession or “any of the usual mourning (rituals) because it’s wartime”, Umm Omar added. “It was very difficult to say goodbye... because the martyrs were buried very quickly,” she said, with fighting raging across the besieged territory. To help Ella, “I ended up pretending” her father was still alive, said Umm Omar.

Still, according to her, others had it worse, “those who have lost an entire family, those who have not been able to say goodbye, or those who find their children in pieces”. With more than 1.5 percent of Gaza’s 2.4 million population killed during the war, many people have lost loved ones. If bodies are unrecognizable or unclaimed, staff record the death under a number, noting all available information. Any distinguishing marks that may help with later identification, whether personal items or a birthmark, are collected and photographed.

Gaza’s health ministry has outlined its procedures for compiling the death toll. In public hospitals under the direct supervision of the territory’s Hamas government, the “personal information and identity number” of every Palestinian killed during the war are entered in the hospital’s database as soon as they are pronounced dead. The data is then sent to the ministry’s central registry on a daily basis.

For deaths in private hospitals and clinics, information is recorded on a form that must be sent to the ministry within 24 hours to be included in the central registry, a ministry statement said. The ministry’s “information centre” then verifies the entries to “ensure they do not contain any duplicates or mistakes”, before saving them in the database, the statement added. Gaza residents are also encouraged by Palestinian authorities to report any deaths in their families on a designated government website. The data is used for the ministry’s verifications.

The ministry is staffed with civil servants that answer to the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority as well as to the Hamas government in Gaza. An investigation conducted by Airwars, an NGO focused on the impact of war on civilians, analyzed the data entries for 3,000 of the dead and found “a high correlation” between the ministry’s data and what Palestinian civilians reported online, with 75 percent of publicly reported names also appearing on the ministry’s list.

The study found that the ministry’s figures had become “less accurate” as the war dragged on, a development it attributed to the heavy damage to health infrastructure resulting from the war. For instance, at southern Gaza’s Nasser Hospital, one of the few still at least partly functioning, only 50 out of 400 computers still work, its director Atef Al-Hout said. — AFP