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.
“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.
Content retrieved from: https://www.firstpost.com/world/gaza-health-ministry-removes-thousands-of-names-from-official-war-casualty-list-can-we-trust-the-numbers-13877384.html.
