Counting the civilian death toll in Gaza

Gathering accurate statistics detailing the ever-mounting toll of civilian deaths in Gaza has been an immense challenge. Now, a new study by the independent British research group Airwars has examined the statistics Gaza’s Health Ministry provided in the war’s first 17 days. Airwars’ head of investigations, Joe Dyke, tells The World’s Marco Werman why he thinks the Health Ministry’s estimates are reliable.

The World

July 29, 2024

Updated on Jul. 28, 2024 · 8:00 PM EDT

By Joyce Hackel

The loss of life in Gaza has been profound. There have been some efforts to count the victims amid the violence and lack of access for foreign journalists and aid workers.

The number of people who have died in Gaza has been turned into a subject of fierce debate. The travel restrictions and communication blackouts have contributed to the difficulty of tracking casualty numbers.

The Gaza Health Ministry estimates the war has killed 39,000 Palestinians in Gaza. With Hamas overseeing the ministry, Israeli authorities have questioned the data. Now, a study by the independent British research group Airwars, led by Joe Dyke, sheds light on the matter.

“In this particular case, we looked only at the first 17 days of the war, which was the period to which the first Ministry of Health list related to” Dyke explained to The World’s host, Marco Werman.

He said that by using an open-source techniques — such as when a family member posts on a Facebook group that their family member was killed, etc. — they found about 3,000 full names from those first 17 days. Of those, around 2,300 had corresponding names on the Ministry of Health list.

“What that tells you, essentially, is that the Ministry of Health list is largely reliable, and also that Palestinians posting online were not exaggerating the civilian harm, at least in that particular period of time.”

Marco Werman: As you said, this was specifically a study of the numbers provided by the Hamas-run Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza during the first 17 days of war in October. As the casualties grew over the next nine months or so of war, the rest of the death toll, was that extrapolated?

Joe Dyke: So, we’re very careful about what we doing and don’t conclude from this study. What we were trying to do is look specifically at that first list. And I think the evidence shows that since then, the hospitals in Gaza have basically collapsed, and it’s due to the war.

And so, this process at the beginning of the war was — all of the names were identified at the morgues. Those morgues were, a lot of them became active fighting grounds, a lot of them, the Israelis took over a number of the hospitals. There were also a lot of places that, essentially, no longer operate as morgues. I think five of the eight that were originally doing it are no longer doing it.

So, everybody accepts that the information is now less reliable than it was eight, nine months ago. So, really what we were trying to do was assess the reliability of that system at the beginning of the war.

Tell us more about the method you use to establish that reliability, like how you made these determinations.

Our Arabic-language team are specialists in documentation of civilian harm. What they do is they basically will begin by seeing that there has been a public allegation of civilian harm in a particular instance. So, somebody, maybe a teacher posting saying a family member has been killed or whatever. And then, they will gather everything that there is about that specific incident, and we’ll put it together into one piece of online published information with everything that we have.

A lot of families have then been posting the list of their family members that have been killed, because many Palestinian families have diaspora across the world. And then, we take those names and then cross-check them with the list produced by the Palestinian Ministry of Health. So, our process was completely independent. And then, at the end, we do a cross-check.

And are you distinguishing between civilians and combatants or not?

We are only looking at cases where there are civilians harmed. So if, for example, there were 12 militants killed but no reports of civilian harm, our researchers would not document it, because that’s not what we focus on. But there are quite a few cases in our archive of, for example, a Hamas militant is killed alongside multiple members of his family who, you know, you can argue about the legality of that, but they are clearly civilian status, right?

So, then, we have a case that’s highlighted in the study of a senior Hamas militant who was killed alongside 18 members of his family. And we would reference that in the report and make it clear in the incident that one of the people who was killed was not a civilian, and the others were believed to be civilians.

Why did you limit your investigation to the first three weeks of the war between Israel and Hamas?

Frankly, it’s a resource thing. Each one of these incidents goes through five levels of review. So, each incident takes between — depending on how complicated it is — it can take several weeks, if not months to go through those different layers of review.

If you look on the website, we have 4,500 incidents that we have monitored, meaning, somebody has said there was an allegation of a civilian killed here, but only 550 of those have been published. And we intend to, over the next several years, continue to go through those.

But essentially, we’re working chronologically. So, most of what we’re doing is from October and November.

So, for journalists, as you know, being able to quantify things like numbers of dead in a war, it’s important, even though on the human scale, one life is everything. One life is a tragedy, a million is a statistic, as the old saying goes.

What do you think, though, about what these numbers tell us?

I think they tell you two main things. One is that what Palestinians are posting online is to be believed, and that families and people who are posting about their suffering — and this is true in Gaza, it’s also true in Syria, is also true in Ukraine, it’s also true wherever — is that these people need to be listened to and their voices need to be listened to and included in terms of the human cost of war, in general.

And then, on this specific case, I think it tells you that that level of matching tells you that there was a relatively rigorous process at the beginning of the war, at least, and that the human cost of this war will take a long, long time to work out, but that it is on a scale of something that we have not seen in a number of years.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity