LONDON: Gaza health ministry casualty figures for the first 17 days of Israel's assault on the enclave were accurate, a new study has found.
British group Airwars said the Hamas-run ministry had identified 7,000 people killed by Israeli strikes in the first weeks of the conflict.
She added that her own research, which reviewed 350 incidents, identified 3,000 victims in the period, 75 percent of whom were also identified by the department, leading to the belief that the authorities' reporting was likely to be largely accurate.
Airwars, which independently verifies the impact of conflict on civilians, said it used a methodology it has also used to assess data from conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, Libya and elsewhere.
She added that there were far more than 350 incidents in the period under review, and that she would continue to study the conflict, but said she believed the statistics in Gaza had become less accurate as the war dragged on and the country's destruction was widespread. territory that prevents local authorities from carrying out their work.
The group's director, Emily Tripp, said the rate at which people were dying in the run-up to the conflict was remarkable.
“We have more people dying per incident than we've seen in any other campaign,” she told the New York Times. “The intensity is greater than anything else we've documented.”
A number of other international groups and experts also said the ministry's figures were initially accurate.
Mike Spagat, a professor at Royal Holloway College, University of London, who reviewed the Airwars findings, told the NYT that the group's numbers “capture much of the ground reality” of what Gaza authorities reported in the early days of the war.
A study by researchers at Johns Hopkins 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 identification numbers from departmental data compiled during October, found “no obvious reason” to ask this.
But in December, citing the collapse of infrastructure in the enclave, including hospitals and morgues, Gaza authorities announced they would begin relying on “reliable media sources” for casualty figures as well as what information could be obtained on the ground.
The latest figures from the ministry say at least 39,000 people have been killed since Israel's invasion began in October.
Israel has often questioned the ministry's numbers based on its closeness to Hamas. Doubts were also voiced from Israel's allies in the West, with US President Joe Biden at one stage saying he “distrusts the (death) numbers that the Palestinians are using. US officials subsequently said the data was more accurate than originally thought.
