Gaza Health Ministry releases updated statistics claiming over 41,000 killed in war, but outstanding casualty issues still not resolved

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The Gaza Ministry of Health, which is under the control of Hamas’ political bureau, released updated figures Monday, claiming that 41,252 Palestinians in Gaza have died since the war started on Oct. 7 of last year.

The ministry also claims that another 95,497 have been wounded in the conflict.

The numbers from the Gaza Ministry of Health (GHM) have been notoriously problematic since the start of the war for several reasons.

The IDF restricts entry into the Gaza Strip, and as a result, there has been no independent verification of those figures.

Even the United Nations, which generally relies on the GHM's figures, took the unusual step of halving the number of women and children it reported as killed in the May conflict, citing erroneous figures in the GHM’s reports.

The Washington Institute published two different analyses of the GHM's casualty counts, one in January, which found that the number of male deaths was being undercounted to artificially inflate the casualty ratio in relation to women and children. The other, published in late March, discovered that not only had that issue continued, but the GHM had switched to using “reliable media sources” to report deaths in certain areas, instead of counting the bodies being delivered to hospitals or morgues.

That change in methodology also led to an under-reporting of male deaths.

In April, "Action on Armed Violence (AOAV)," a UK-based charity that records, investigates, and disseminates evidence of armed violence against civilians worldwide, published a report on the GHM’s figures which found several inconsistencies in the data, with one out of every 7 listed deaths having incomplete or false information.

At around the same time, the ministry released a report in Arabic acknowledging that it had “incomplete data” for 11,371 of the 33,091 Palestinian fatalities it claimed to have documented until then.

The figures released by the GHM on Monday continued to demonstrate a reporting of incomplete data, with around 10,000 recorded deaths having no means of verification.

The Gaza Ministry of Health does not distinguish between combatants and civilians in its figures, neither does it distinguish between deaths caused by the IDF, deaths caused by Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) misfires, or deaths related to natural or health issues.

In the report, the GHM has full and accurate data for 34,344 Palestinians who died between Oct. 7, 2023, and Aug. 31, 2024. Meanwhile, the IDF claims to have counted around 17,000 Palestinian militants killed by Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip at the same time.

On Monday, Gaza authorities claimed that at least 18 Palestinians were killed in Israeli airstrikes across the Gaza Strip in the last 24 hours. While the IDF did not release any statements about the deaths, it did say that the forces carried out an airstrike on a group of Hamas operatives in a command-and-control room embedded in the Ghazi Al-Shawa School in Beit Hanoun.

The IDF stated that Hamas had taken over part of the school and was using it to prepare rocket launches against Israel.

Israel’s public broadcaster, KAN News, reported on Sunday that Hamas was re-establishing itself in the northern Gaza Strip despite IDF efforts to dismantle the terror group.

Osama Hamdan, a senior Hamas official based in Istanbul, Turkey, told AFP news that it still has the resources to continue its fight despite heavy losses over the last 11 months.

“The resistance [Hamas] has a high ability to continue,” Hamdan said, before claiming that the war provided “an accumulation of experiences and the recruitment of new generations into the resistance.”

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant recently shared evidence of a document he said was recovered in the Gaza Strip in which a senior Hamas official reports to Yahya Sinwar and his brother Mohammed Sinwar that the Khan Younis Brigade had lost approximately 50% of its fighters.