Geneva:

Palestinian health authorities say Israel’s ground and air campaign in Gaza has killed more than 38,000 people, mostly civilians, and driven most of the enclave’s 2.3 million people from their homes.

The war began on Oct. 7 when Hamas operatives rushed across the border into Israeli communities. Israel says the operatives killed more than 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and dragged 253 into captivity in Gaza.

This explainer examines how the Palestinian death count is calculated, how reliable it is, the breakdown of civilians and fighters killed and what each side says.

HOW DO GAZA HEALTH AUTHORITIES CALCULATE THE DEATH COUNT?

In the first months of the war, death counts were calculated entirely from counting bodies that arrived in hospitals and data included names and identity numbers for most of those killed.

As the conflict ground on, and fewer hospitals and morgues continued to operate, the authorities adopted other methods too.

From early May, the Health Ministry updated its breakdown of total fatalities to include unidentified bodies which account for nearly a third of the overall deaths. Omar Hussein Ali, head of the ministry’s emergency operations centre in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, said these were bodies that had arrived at hospitals or medical centres without personal data such as identity numbers or full names.

It also began including deaths reported online by family members who had to input information including identity numbers.

IS THE GAZA DEATH COUNT COMPREHENSIVE?

The numbers “do not necessarily reflect all victims due to the fact that many victims are still missing under the rubble”, the Palestinian Health Ministry says. In May it estimated that some 10,000 bodies were uncounted in this way.

The Lancet medical journal published a letter from three academics on July 5 estimating that indirect deaths, caused by factors such as disease, might mean the death count is several times higher than official Palestinian estimates.

The letter said it was “not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza”.

The authors said the figure, which made global headlines, was based on what they said was the conservative estimate of four indirect deaths to one direct death based on trends from prior conflicts.

The U.N. human rights office and the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health have also said during the conflict that the true figures are likely higher than those published, without giving specifics.

HOW CREDIBLE IS THE GAZA DEATH COUNT?

Pre-war Gaza had robust population statistics and better health information systems than in most Middle East countries, public health experts told Reuters.

A spokesperson for the World Health Organisation said the ministry has “good capacity in data collection/analysis and its previous reporting has been considered credible”.

The United Nations regularly cites the ministry’s death count figures, while naming the ministry as the source.

Early in the conflict, after U.S. President Joe Biden cast doubt on casualty figures, the health ministry published a detailed list of the 7,028 deaths that had been registered by that point.

Academics looking at details of listed casualties said in a peer-reviewed article in the Lancet medical journal in November that it was implausible that the patterns shown in the list could be the result of fabrication.

However, there are specific questions over the inclusion of 471 people said to have been killed in an Oct. 17 blast at al-Ahli al-Arab hospital in Gaza City. An unclassified U.S. intelligence report estimated that death count “at the low end of the 100 to 300 spectrum”.

DOES HAMAS CONTROL THE FIGURES?

While Hamas has run Gaza since 2007, the enclave’s Health Ministry also answers to the overall Palestinian Authority ministry in Ramallah in the West Bank.

Gaza’s Hamas-run government has paid the salaries of all those hired in public departments since 2007, including in the Health Ministry. The Palestinian Authority still pays the salaries of those hired before then.

The extent of Hamas control in Gaza now is difficult to assess with Israeli forces occupying most of the territory, including around locations of major hospitals that provide casualty figures, and with fighting ongoing.

WHAT DOES ISRAEL SAY?

Israeli officials have said the figures are suspect because of Hamas’ control over government in Gaza. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Oren Mamorstein said the numbers were manipulated and “do not reflect the reality on the ground”.

However, Israel’s military has also accepted in briefings that the overall Gaza casualty numbers are broadly reliable.

In May, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said 14,000 Hamas fighters and 16,000 Palestinian civilians had been killed in the war.

HOW MANY CIVILIANS HAVE BEEN KILLED?

The Health Ministry figures do not differentiate between civilians and Hamas combatants, who do not wear formal uniform or carry separate identification.

Israel periodically provides estimates of how many Hamas fighters it believes have been killed. The most recent was Netanyahu’s estimate of 14,000.

Israeli security officials say such estimates are reached through a combination of counting bodies on the battlefield, intercepts of Hamas communications and intelligence assessments of personnel in targets that were destroyed.

Hamas has said Israeli estimates for its losses are exaggerated but has not said how many of its fighters have been killed.

The Palestinian Health Ministry says more than 70% of the dead are women and children. For most of the conflict its figures showed children as representing slightly over 40% of all those killed.

However, conditions in hospitals compiling figures have worsened amid the fighting and many of those killed may not be identifiable due to their injuries.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Palestinian Territories:

Hamas on Thursday called for an end to airdrops of aid after two Palestinians were killed in northern Gaza when a aid pallet crashed into a warehouse after its parachute failed to open.

Several countries, including the United States, Britain and France, have resorted to regular aid airdrops in northern Gaza, where humanitarian agencies have warned of a looming famine.

On Tuesday, two people died when an aid parachute fell on the roof of a warehouse where residents had gathered to collect relief supplies.

The latest fatalities take to at least 21 the number of people killed when airdrops of aid have gone disastrously wrong, according to the Hamas authorities.

“We reiterate that airdrops pose a real danger to the lives of citizens and do not provide a real solution to alleviate the food crisis plaguing northern Gaza,” Salama Marouf, head of the government’s media office in Gaza, said in a statement.

“We call for an immediate halt to the delivery of aid in this ineffective and erroneous manner, and we call for the full activation of the land crossings to deliver humanitarian aid to northern Gaza.”

With only a trickle of aid reaching the starving north and the United Nations warning of “imminent famine”, foreign governments have turned to airdrops to get aid into the territory.

Aid agencies say the situation has deteriorated this week after Israeli forces closed the Rafah border crossing with Egypt after taking control of it.

Relief also has not been transferred into Gaza through the other main crossing between Israel and the Palestinian territory, Kerem Shalom, after it came under rocket fire three times since Sunday.

Meanwhile, a US container ship loaded with aid for Gaza left Cyprus Thursday in a new test of a maritime corridor to get relief into the besieged territory.

The US-flagged MV Sagamore left the port of Larnaca after being loaded with aid from Britain, Cyprus and the United States, Cyprus government spokesperson Yiannis Antoniou told the official CNA news agency.

US military engineers have been assembling a temporary pier for installation on the Gaza coast to unload maritime aid deliveries.

UN agencies and humanitarian aid groups have warned that maritime deliveries and airdrops cannot deliver aid in the quantities needed to avert acute food shortages for the 2.4 million people across Gaza.

Gaza has been devastated by the war which started with Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel that resulted in the deaths of about 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 34,904 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)