Gaza health ministry removes thousands of names from official war casualty list: Report

As the Israel-Hamas war continues to escalate, the latest report suggests that Gaza’s health ministry has removed 1,852 people from its official list of fatalities since October. According to an investigative report published by Sky News, the names were removed by the Hamas-run agencies because some of these victims died of natural causes or were alive but imprisoned.

As per the report, the list of total fatalities in the coastal enclave currently stands at 50,609 following the removals. 97 per cent of the names removed from the list were initially submitted through an online form which allows families to record the death of loved ones where their body is missing.

The head of the statistics team at Gaza’s health ministry, Zaher Al Wahidi, told Sky News that the name submitted through the form had been removed as a “precautionary measure” and there will be a judicial investigation into each case.

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“We realised that a lot of people [submitted via the form] died a natural death,” Wahidi told the British news outlet. “Maybe they were near an explosion and they had a heart attack, or [living in destroyed] houses caused them pneumonia or hypothermia. All these cases we don’t [attribute to] the war,” he added.

Some families submit false claims

Wahidi mentioned that some names submitted via the website were found to be imprisoned or missing, with insufficient evidence that they had died in the war. The Gaza health ministry statistician said that there were some Palestinians who submitted false claims as they may have been motivated by the promise of government financial assistance.

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This is not the first time names were removed from the official ministry death list; however, it was the most significant removal. Between August and September last year, 1,441 names were removed from the list—54% of them originated from the hospital morgue records rather than the online forum. Wahidi told Sky News that his team started auditing the data after the ministry received complaints from people who had ended up on the list despite being alive.

Wahidi noted that 8 per cent of the people who were listed as dead in August have since been removed from the official death toll. However, many of these people were added back during a judicial investigation process.

Lack of Verification process was the route cause

Wahidi said that until October, the names submitted via the online form were added to the official list of registered deaths without undergoing a judicial confirmation process. Out of the 1,295 people removed from the list, 474 were added back following proper verification.

“This does cause me to downgrade the quality of the earlier lists, definitely below where I thought they were,” said Professor Michael Spagat, chair of Every Casualty Counts, an independent civilian casualty monitoring organisation.

“They basically said that they were posting these things provisionally pending investigation. There may have been literally zero people, including us, who actually absorbed this message, but they weren’t hiding it either,” he added.