LONDON: The Gaza 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 by Israeli airstrikes in the first few weeks of the conflict.
She added that her own research, which assessed 350 incidents, identified 3,000 victims during the period in question, of which 75 percent were also identified by the ministry, leading her to believe that reporting to the authorities may be in very accurate measure.
Airwars, which works to independently verify the effects of conflict on civilians, said it used a methodology it has also used to assess figures from conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, Libya and elsewhere.
She added that there were well over 350 incidents during the period in question and that she would continue to study the conflict, but said she believed the statistics from Gaza had become less accurate as the war dragged on, with destruction on a scale wide in territory that hinders the ability of local authorities to do their job.
Emily Tripp, the group's director, said the rate at which people died in the preliminary stages of the conflict stood out.
“We have, depending on the incident, more people dying than we've seen in any other campaign,” she told the New York Times. “The intensity is higher than anything else we've documented.”
Numerous other international groups and experts also said the ministry's data was initially accurate.
Mike Spagat, a professor at Royal Holloway College, University of London, who analyzed Airwars' findings, told the NYT that the group's figures “capture much of the ground reality” of what Gazan authorities reported in the early days of the war.
A study by researchers at Johns Hopkins in the US found no evidence that the ministry's data was significantly wrong until early November.
Researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who analyzed ID numbers from ministry data compiled during October, found “no obvious reason” to ask.
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 that could be gathered on the ground .
The ministry's latest figures say at least 39,000 people have been killed since Israel began its invasion in October.
Israel has frequently questioned the ministry's figures based on its proximity to Hamas. Doubts have also been echoed by Israel's allies in the West, with US President Joe Biden at one point saying he “doesn't trust the number (of deaths) that the Palestinians are using”. US officials later said the data was more accurate than originally thought.
