Gaza health ministry lists names of 6,747 Palestinians killed by Israel

News Desk - The Cradle 

The Hamas-linked health ministry published the names of those confirmed killed by Israeli bombing in response to doubts of casualty counts expressed by President Biden

Mohammad Tamimi, 2 years old, was shot by Israeli forces last Thursday. (Photo credit: Getty)

The Ministry of Health in Gaza published a report on 26 October with the names of the Palestinians killed by Israel in its 19-day bombing campaign in Gaza, in response to the skepticism of the expressed by the US and Israel. 

The list of the dead included in the report of the Ministry of Health in Gaza includes the names of 6,747 people, including 2,665 children. The report does not include the names of another 281 Palestinians who have been killed, but not yet identified.

The report issued by the Ministry of Health in Gaza, which has been subjected to aerial and artillery bombardment since the seventh of this month, was 212 pages long, with the age, gender, and ID number of each victim clearly stated.

On 26 October, US President Joseph Biden questioned the validity of the casualty numbers announced by the ministry, which have shocked international observers and led to accusations that Israel is committing war crimes and even genocide. 

Critics have suggested the health ministry, which is controlled by Hamas as the ruling faction in Gaza, is reporting inflated casualty numbers to win international sympathy for the Palestinian cause.

However, the Washington Post reported that the casualty numbers reported by the ministry during the course of the decades long Israel-Palestine conflict have long proven accurate.

“Everyone uses the figures from the Gaza Health Ministry because those are generally proven to be reliable,” said Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch. “In the times in which we have done our own verification of numbers for particular strikes, I’m not aware of any time which there’s been some major discrepancy.”

“We know that a health ministry is going to base [death tolls] on assessments coming from hospitals, morgues, et cetera,” he said. “They have an ability to collect that in a way that other sources not there can’t do.”

At the same time President Biden expressed doubts about the numbers of Palestinians killed by Israel, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby warned that more civilian casualties in Gaza should be expected, casting them as unavoidable, rather than a result of Israel’s deliberate policies.

"This is war. It is combat. It is bloody. It is ugly, and it's going to be messy. And innocent civilians are going to be hurt going forward," Kirby told reporters. "I wish I could tell you something different. I wish that that wasn't going to happen, but it is going to happen."

Israeli politicians and media personalities have increased their calls in recent days to completely destroy not only Hamas, but all of Gaza and its inhabitants.

Separately from the Gaza health ministry, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) said that 2,360 children have been killed and 5,364 wounded since the beginning of the war in the Gaza Strip as a result of the continuous Israeli bombing. This means that an average of 400 children have been killed or injured every day of the 19-day war.

UNICEF said that the number of dead and wounded children in Gaza constitutes a growing stain on the collective conscience, and called for an immediate ceasefire and allowing humanitarian aid to enter the Strip without obstacles.