Anything Hamas says must be judged against the track record of its past falsehoods and distortions, this is their norm, not the exception. If someone still takes their words at face value, no fact or evidence will change how they see them.
Before October 2023, several high-profile Hamas claims were later undermined by evidence: after denying involvement in the June 2014 kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers, senior Hamas leader Saleh al-Arouri publicly acknowledged the group’s role; while Hamas framed the 2018 “Great March of Return” as largely civilian, its own official Salah al-Bardawil said 50 of the 62 people killed on May 14, 2018 were Hamas members; despite Hamas’s insistence that it did not use civilian sites, the U.N. agency UNRWA repeatedly found rockets stored in its Gaza schools in 2014; and although Hamas dismissed allegations of abuses against Palestinian rivals, Amnesty International documented a 2014 campaign of abductions, torture and summary executions in Gaza.
The Gaza Health Ministry has a very good track record of providing verifiable death counts.
It works on the basis of reports from hospitals, and keeps information (like name, ID number, age and gender) for every deceased person. A lot of that information can actually be verified by Israel, since Israel controls the Gaza population Registry. If these people later showed up alive, that would easily prove the Health Ministry is lying. Yet that hasn't happened.
After past conflicts, outside organizations have reviewed the Health Ministry's numbers, and have determined them to be accurate, which is why major news organizations consider it reliable.[0] Even the Israeli government privately considers the numbers to be reliable and uses them in internal discussions, though it publicly claims them to be unreliable (the reader can guess why). Israeli intelligence has surveilled the Health Ministry, and came to the conclusion that it was working in good faith.[1] Again, this is completely different from what the Israeli government says in public.
The Gaza Health Ministry has periodically released its entire list of verified deaths. You can read every person's name, age, etc.[2]
The main concern about the numbers is that they are probably a massive undercount. Every hospital in Gaza has been bombed by the IDF, and the healthcare system is barely functioning at all any more. Beyond that, there is rubble everywhere, and nobody knows how many people lie dead underneath it.
> The main concern about the numbers is that they are probably a massive undercount. Every hospital in Gaza has been bombed by the IDF, and the healthcare system is barely functioning at all any more. Beyond that, there is rubble everywhere, and nobody knows how many people lie dead underneath it.
Just to back this up - this study published in the Lancet estimates a 41% undercount for deaths up to June 30, 2024.
This is exactly the sort of brain-dead take that my comment was meant to correct.
The Gaza Health Ministry is a professional organization that has been found again and again to work reliably. Even Israeli intelligence has determined that the Gaza Health Ministry is reliable. Look, I don't like the fact that a far-right political party (founded by a literal terrorist, Menachem Begin) that wants to annex the West Bank and Gaza runs the Israeli government, but I still trust morgue data that comes out of Israel. The same goes for Gaza.
The Gaza Health Ministry was also completely destroyed in March 2024, because the increasing death toll was inconvenient. Since then, the most cited death toll ("more than 50,000") has been the one that was current in March 2024.
You'll have to explain that to the Israeli intelligence services, which surveiled Gaza Health Ministry staff (e.g., listening to their phone calls) and determined that they were working in good faith.
Just because the governing political party carries out terrorist attacks against Israel, that does not mean that literally every institution in Gaza is unreliable. The IDF carries out war crimes all the time and is known to be extremely unreliable,[0] but there are still many institutions inside Israel that are reliable.
0. There are way, way too many examples of this to list here, but I'll just highlight one. The IDF attacked a convoy of Palestinian ambulances in Rafah, killing almost all of the paramedics. When this came out, the IDF put out a statement claiming that the ambulances were actually being used as a cover for Palestinian Islamic Jihad and had approached an IDF position with their lights off. Then, a video surfaced of the incident, showing that the ambulances were flashing their emergency lights, and that the paramedics were unarmed and had been gunned down by the IDF. It also came out that the IDF had subsequently buried the ambulances, in order to try to hide the evidence. In other words, the IDF committed a war crime, tried to cover it up, and then concocted an elaborate series of lies that they put out for public consumption: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafah_paramedic_massacre.
It's very convenient to assert that literally nothing that goes on within Gaza is knowable, in exclusion of any other facts, "because Hamas", but you're not actually engaging with the reality that external validation and corroboration can still exist.
So you say IDF is so inept it can't stop this after year and half? How much longer and what kind of escalation will it take? They are basically letting Hamas win this way. As if it was some unfathomable mysterious adversary that had not lived next door for decades.
Before October 2023, several high-profile Hamas claims were later undermined by evidence: after denying involvement in the June 2014 kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers, senior Hamas leader Saleh al-Arouri publicly acknowledged the group’s role; while Hamas framed the 2018 “Great March of Return” as largely civilian, its own official Salah al-Bardawil said 50 of the 62 people killed on May 14, 2018 were Hamas members; despite Hamas’s insistence that it did not use civilian sites, the U.N. agency UNRWA repeatedly found rockets stored in its Gaza schools in 2014; and although Hamas dismissed allegations of abuses against Palestinian rivals, Amnesty International documented a 2014 campaign of abductions, torture and summary executions in Gaza.
Sources: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israelg... https://www.memri.org/tv/hamas-politburo-member-bardawil-fif... https://www.unrwa.org/newsroom/press-releases/unrwa-condemns... https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/05/gaza-palestin...