Propaganda is flying around like crazy in this conflict and I think it’s time for our community to come together and try to separate the truth from misinformation and chaff. Similar to my last post on the al-Ahli Hospital Massacre, we’re going to go with the following format:
For top-level comments, post the claim being made as well as who made the claim (please cite as close to the original source as possible) and, if possible, the date/time that claim was made.
For other comments, please try to either prove or debunk claims using multiple sources and verifiable information.
[unknown date] The IDF has claimed that the Gaza Health Ministry “continually inflates the number of civilian casualties”
[2023/10/25] U.S. President Joe Biden said on Wednesday he has “no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using” for the death toll in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip
[2023/10/27] Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch, said he saw no evidence that the numbers were being manipulated. “We have been monitoring human rights abuses in the Gaza Strip for three decades, including several rounds of hostilities. We’ve generally found the data that comes out of the ministry of health to be reliable,” he said
“Everyone uses the figures from the Gaza Health Ministry because those are generally proven to be reliable,” said Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch. “In the times in which we have done our own verification of numbers for particular strikes, I’m not aware of any time which there’s been some major discrepancy.”
[2023/11/09] A senior Biden administration official said the death toll of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip is likely far higher than the 10,000 number being reported by the health ministry amid Israel’s war against Hamas.
[2023/10/27] Palestinian health officials have been daily releasing a death toll of those killed in Israel’s bombardment of the enclave. On Thursday, as questions have been raised about its figures’ validity, the ministry released a document that gives a death toll of 7,028, with all but 281 having been identified by name, age, gender and identification number. By gender, 3,899 are female and 2,813 are male. There are also 2,665 deceased children, according to the ministry.
The document in question: https://www.moh.gov.ps/portal/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/تقرير-نهائي-باسماء-الشهداء-1.pdf
[2022] In the past, the US state department’s annual human rights report indirectly relied on the same ministry’s casualty figures in quoting UN statistics drawn from Palestinian data.
https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/415610_WEST-BANK-AND-GAZA-2022-HUMAN-RIGHTS-REPORT.pdf
Edit: Added State Department report
[2023/10/27] Speaking with reporters on Friday, the UN agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) chief, Philippe Lazzarini, said that few have doubted the credibility of the figures in previous wars. “In the past, the five, six cycles of conflict in the Gaza Strip, these figures were considered as credible and no one ever really challenged these figures,” Lazzarini told reporters in Jerusalem.