LONDON: Gaza's Health Ministry's casualty figures for the first 17 days of Israel's attack on the enclave were accurate, a new study has found.
British group Airwars said the Hamas-run ministry had identified 7,000 people killed in Israeli strikes in the first few weeks of the conflict.
He added that his own research, which assessed 350 incidents, found 3,000 victims in the period under review, 75 percent of whom were also identified by the ministry, leading him to believe that authorities' reports were likely largely accurate.
Airwars, an independent reviewer of the effects of conflict on civilians, said it used the methodology it has also deployed to estimate the numbers of conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, Libya and elsewhere.
He added that there were well over 350 incidents in the period under review and that he would continue to study the conflict, but said he believed the statistics in Gaza had become less accurate as the war dragged on, with widespread destruction in Gaza. areas that prevent local authorities from doing their work.
Emily Tripp, the group's director, said the rate of death in the earlier stages of the conflict stood out.
“We have more people killed in one incident than we've seen in any other company,” she told the New York Times. “The intensity is higher than anything we've documented.”
Numerous other international groups and experts have also said the ministry's data was initially accurate.
Mike Spagat, a professor at King's Holloway College, University of London, who reviewed Airwars' findings, told the NYT that the group's figures “reflect a good deal of the ground reality” of what Gaza authorities reported in the early days of the war.
A study by Johns Hopkins researchers in the US also found no evidence that the ministry's data was significantly wrong until early November.
Researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who analyzed ID numbers from ministry data collected during October, found “no obvious reason” to ask for them.
But in December, Gaza authorities, citing the collapse of infrastructure in the enclave, including hospitals and morgues, announced that they would begin relying on “reliable media sources” for casualty figures as well as information available on the ground.
The latest figures from the ministry say at least 39,000 people have been killed since Israel began its invasion in October.
Israel has often requested the ministry's figures based on its closeness to Hamas. Doubts have also been raised by Israel's Western allies, with US President Joe Biden at one stage saying he was “not sure of the (death) numbers the Palestinians are using”. US officials later said the data was more accurate than originally thought.
