The World Health Organization (WHO) assures that the Palestinian deaths in the war in Gaza are more than 35,000, despite questions from Israel, and that, of these victims, some 25,000 have been completely identified and the rest are in the process of being identified. be.
The Health Ministry in Gaza, where Hamas rules – considered a terrorist organization by the European Union (EU), the US and other countries – last week updated its breakdown of the around 35,000 dead since October 7, saying that, so far, some 25,000 of them have been fully identified, and more than half were women and children.
United Nations agencies have republished the Palestinian figures, which have since exceeded 35,000 dead, citing the source. This sparked accusations of inaccuracy from Israel, as Palestinian authorities had previously estimated that more than 70 percent of the dead were women and children.
Oren Marmorstein, spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, accused Palestinian Hamas militants on Monday of manipulating the figures, saying that “they are not accurate and do not reflect the reality on the ground.” “The repetition of Hamas’ propaganda messages, without the use of any verification process, has proven time and again to be methodologically flawed and unprofessional,” he said in a social media post.
WHO assures that it has “nothing to correct”
“There is nothing wrong with the data, the global data (more than 35,000) remains the same,” WHO spokesman Christian Lindmeier said at a press conference in Geneva, in response to questions about the number of victims. “The fact that we now have 25,000 people identified is a step forward,” he added.
Based on his own extrapolation of the latest Palestinian data, he said that around 60 percent of the victims were women and children, but many bodies buried under the rubble would likely fall into these categories when they were finally identified.
“Now, the Ministry of Health in Gaza goes further and identifies every body, every death, names these people and informs the families,” Lindmeier said. And she reported that the process of identifying corpses is terribly painful, as it includes the identification of charred bodies, including those of children.
Lindmeier explained that the identification and registration of dead people is carried out in medical facilities or morgues, and “does not include those who are in mass graves, under destroyed buildings or (who died) in areas that are out of reach (of the relief teams) due to the intensity of the conflict.
For his part, the spokesperson for the United Nations Humanitarian Aid Coordination Office (OCHA), Jens Laerke, also emphasized that “there is nothing to correct” in relation to the number of victims.
Israel also corrected downward figures after October 7
Furthermore, Lindmeier, the WHO spokesperson, added that it is “normal” for the death toll to change in conflicts, recalling that Israel also revised its own death toll downwards, from 1,400 to 1,200 people, after post-war checks. October 7.
UN spokesmen also warned against accepting the discussion around the figures provided by the Palestinian authorities as a distraction from the horrors of the war.
“Basically, we’re talking about 35,000 people who have died, and really every life matters, right?” Liz Throssel, spokesperson for the U.N. human rights office, said at the same briefing. “And we know that many of them are women and children, and that there are thousands of missing people under the rubble.”
To these figures, according to these sources, are added almost 79,000 Gazan injuries recorded since last October 7, when Hamas brutally attacked Israel and caused 1,200 civilian deaths, in addition to taking some 240 hostages, unleashing the offensive that Israel is carrying out in Gaza since then.
Palestinian figures ‘generally accurate’ in the past
The day before, UN spokesman Farhan Haq had also spoken before reporters in New York, acknowledging that the UN teams in Gaza have not been able to independently verify the figures of the Hamas Ministry of Health, given the war. ongoing and the large number of deaths.
But, “unfortunately, we have the sad experience of coordinating with the Ministry of Health on casualty figures every few years, for incidents with large casualties in Gaza, and in the past their figures have proven to be generally accurate,” Haq said.
The World Health Organization “has a long-standing cooperation with the Ministry of Health in Gaza and we can attest that the Ministry of Health has good data collection and analysis capacity and its previous reports have been considered credible,” he explained. likewise another WHO spokesperson, Margaret Harris. “The real numbers could be even higher,” she said.
rml (efe, reuters, dpa)
