Ministers and MPs have been “urged” by the statistics watchdog to provide the source when quoting death figures from the Hamas-run health ministry and to recognize their “limitations”, amid claims the numbers cannot be trusted.
Last month, The Telegraph reported that Sir Michael Ellis, the former attorney general, and Andrew Percy, his fellow Conservative MP, had written to the UK Statistics Authority to alert it to an admission by Hamas that it has “incomplete data” on a third of Gazan deaths.
The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza says that at least 34,596 Palestinians have been killed since the start of the war sparked by the Oct 7 attack, but the veracity of their statistics has been disputed.
In a reply to the two MPs, Sir Robert Chote, the chair of the UK Statistics Authority, said: “As you will appreciate, it is beyond our remit and our capability to assess the accuracy of casualty statistics in an overseas conflict.
“Tracking the number of fatalities is challenging in any conflict and there are often inaccuracies and inconsistencies in real-time reporting. There is always the potential for numbers emerging from a conflict situation to be contested, and for there to be suspicions that they reflect a particular narrative.”
