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.)

After US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh Sunday, both posted a similar photo – but with contrasting descriptions.

Blinken said they talked about “the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel,” in his post to X, formerly Twitter. The prince said they were looking for ways “to stop the military operations that have claimed the lives of innocent people,” a reference to Israel’s bombing of Gaza.

The disconnect isn’t limited to the Saudis. Just a few governments in the region have publicly denounced the October 7 Hamas massacre of 1,300 Israelis. Instead, the focus of much of the rest of the world has shifted to civilian casualties in Gaza, where daily Israeli airstrikes have killed more than 3,000. Even allies like the US and UK have publicly called on Israel to protect noncombatants as it prepares for a massive ground invasion.

Israeli officials can’t believe it. They have spent every day since the attacks bringing foreign leaders and journalists to the unbearably grim sites of the killing, gathering testimonies from survivors and splicing together video of gruesome beheadings and eye-gougings recorded – often gleefully – by the perpetrators.

The aim of these presentations is to get the world to agree that Israel now has not only a license to destroy Hamas – designated a terrorist organization by the US and European Union – but a collective responsibility to do so, just as the US won international support after the September 11 attacks to eradicate Al-Qaeda and later against ISIS.

“There are no two sides to this conflict,” said Lior Haiat, spokesman for Israel’s Foreign Ministry in a Zoom presentation that included two survivors on Monday. “If someone is not standing with us today, he is standing with monsters who murder babies and old people. If you are not standing against terror, you are part of terror.”

For Israel, the mobilization of 360,000 soldiers and demand that 1.1 million Palestinians in Gaza move south within 24 hours as it pounded the area from the air count as justified responses to unspeakable acts.

“Let me tell you, Mr. Secretary, this will be a long war, the price will be high,” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant warned Blinken Monday. “But we are going to win for Israel and the Jewish people, and for the values that both countries believe in.”

But elsewhere, Israel’s preparations are fueling more alarm than resolve.

Even as US President Joe Biden has publicly sided with Israel’s view that Hamas should be eliminated entirely, he’s repeatedly called on the government to limit civilian casualties. “The overwhelming majority of Palestinians had nothing to do with Hamas,” he said Friday.

UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly told Sky News, “It is in Israel’s interest to avoid civilian casualties and Palestinian casualties, because Hamas clearly wants to turn this into a wider Arab-Israeli war, or indeed a war between the Muslim world and the wider world. And none of us, including Israel, want that to be the case.”

In the Middle East, Hamas isn’t seen as a global terror force the way ISIS and Al-Qaeda were. Instead, it’s often portrayed as an awful product of decades of oppression by Israel.

Officials across the region – in Kuwait, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, and elsewhere – say their populations are restive as they watch Israel pound Gaza. Their citizens display a high degree of support for Hamas, making it hard for them to even condemn the October 7 attacks. They are pressuring the US for humanitarian aid to Gaza.

Israeli officials chafe at what they see as hypocritical lecturing.

“When the Americans went to Fallujah after 9/11, they didn’t ask questions about the humanitarian needs of Fallujah,” said Yaakov Amidror, who was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s national security adviser a decade ago, speaking to foreign journalists. “The best example is the Second World War in which the whole free world fought against German Nazis, and no one asked about the humanitarian needs of the enemy. It’s a war against an enemy state.”

In Israel, there is a sense that no matter what has happened before – settlement building, military incursions – history turned a new page on October 7 because of the level of savagery on display. The impact has been deeply personal in a small country where almost no one has been unaffected, and where many come from countries of pogroms and Holocaust.

The Israeli military on Monday brought a dozen foreign correspondents to see a 42-minute compilation of the horrors of October 7, showing attackers stopping cars and shooting passengers, axing a dead body, burning a house, and resting to drink water on a porch. The military’s chief spokesman, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, said, “We see this as a war against humanity, not just Israel.”

In the coming days, visits by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and probably by Biden are likely to delay Israel’s invasion of Gaza. The more time passes, the wider the gap is likely to grow between the view held firmly by Israel and much of the rest of the world.

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