LONDON: Gaza's health ministry's casualty figures for the first 17 days of Israel's attack on the enclave were accurate, a new study has found.
British group Airwars said the Hamas-run ministry had identified 7,000 people in the first weeks of the conflict killed by Israeli strikes.
It added that its own research, which assessed 350 incidents, had identified 3,000 fatalities in the period under review, 75 percent of which were also identified by the ministry, leading it to believe that the authorities' reporting was likely to be broadly accurate.
Airwars, which works to independently verify the impact of conflict on civilians, said it used a method it also used to assess figures from conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, Libya and elsewhere.
It added that there had been far more than 350 incidents in the period under review and that it would continue to study the conflict, but said it believed the statistics in Gaza had become less accurate as the war dragged on, with widespread destruction in the territory which inhibits the ability of local authorities to carry out their jobs.
Emily Tripp, the group's director, said the rate at which people had died in the preliminary stages of the conflict had stood out.
“We have, per incident, more people dying than we've seen in any other campaign,” she told the New York Times. “The intensity is greater than anything else we have documented.”
Several other international groups and experts have also said that the ministry's information was initially accurate.
Mike Spagat, a professor at Royal Holloway College, University of London, who reviewed Airwar's findings, told the NYT that the group's figures “capture much of the underlying reality” of what Gaza authorities reported in the early days of the war.
A study conducted by researchers at Johns Hopkins in the United States also found no evidence that the ministry's data was significantly inaccurate until early November.
Researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who analyzed ID numbers from ministry data compiled throughout October, found “no apparent reason” to ask for it.
But in December, Gaza authorities, citing the collapse of infrastructure in the enclave, including hospitals and morgues, announced that they would begin relying on “reliable media sources” for casualty figures as well as what information could be gathered on the ground.
The ministry's latest figures say at least 39,000 people have been killed since Israel began its invasion in October.
Israel has often disputed the ministry's figures based on its closeness to Hamas. Doubts have also been echoed by Israeli allies in the West, with US President Joe Biden at one point saying he had “no confidence in the numbers (of deaths) that the Palestinians are using.” US officials have later said the data is more accurate than first thought.
