More than 40,000 killed in Gaza, Hamas-run health ministry says

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The majority of the destruction in the southern city of Rafah came after Israel launched an offensive there in early May

More than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed as a result of Israeli military action in Gaza since the 7 October Hamas-led attack on Israel, the Hamas-run health ministry says.

That number – 40,005 on Thursday – equates to about 1.7per cent of the 2.3 million population of the territory – another sobering indication of the human cost of the war.

Alongside the fatalities, satellite image analysis suggests nearly 60per cent of buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed since the beginning of the war.

In the past few months, the southern city of Rafah has suffered the most damage, imagery shows.

The ministry’s figures for the number of people killed do not differentiate between civilians and fighters.

However, its breakdown of identified reported fatalities says a majority are children, women or elderly people.

This month, Israel’s military told the BBC that more than 15,000 terrorists had been killed during the war.

International journalists, including the BBC, are blocked by Israel from entering Gaza independently, so are unable to verify figures from either side.

In the past, figures from the Gaza Ministry of Health (MoH) were widely used in times of conflict and seen as reliable by the UN and international institutions.

It only counted deaths registered in hospitals with these entered in a centralised system along with names, identity numbers and other details.

However, by late last year the MoH was unable to function effectively with overflowing mortuaries, fighting in and around hospitals and poor internet and phone connectivity.

The Hamas Government Media Office (GMO) in Gaza began publishing numbers of deaths including reports given in “reliable media”.

UN agencies started to incorporate this into their data breakdowns as well as MoH figures when updates were available.

More recently, Gaza’s MoH has begun to incorporate those reported as killed in the war including by family members online in its overall tally.

However, it also counts separately the number of unidentified bodies among the total number killed.

The UN now quotes these figures, with officials attributing them and stressing that their Gaza teams cannot independently verify them due to the conditions on the ground and the high volume of fatalities.

Israel has consistently questioned the credibility of the information. In May, the Foreign Minister Israel Katz described it as “fake data from a terrorist organisation”.