"This comes after two years in which Israel and its supporters took every opportunity to disparage and dismiss the health ministry's figures, arguing that they were overblown or fabricated by Hamas. That prestigious list of repudiators, to name just a few, includes spokespeople for Israel's government and military, then-US president Joe Biden, US Congress, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) chief Jonathan Greenblatt, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) and any number of talking heads at influential thinktanks and policy centres."
"In truth, the reliability of the official death toll should never have been in doubt. For one thing, the UN has independently verified the accuracy of the health ministry's figures after each of Israel's previous bombardments of Gaza going back to 2008. For another, the data published by the health ministry since 7 October is extremely detailed: it includes a full name, date of birth, gender and ID number for all victims whose deaths were confirmed either by hospital morgues or by their relatives."
Israel has accepted the Gaza health ministry's published death toll, which currently exceeds 70,000. For two years many Israeli officials, American leaders, advocacy groups and international media repeatedly disparaged or dismissed the ministry's figures as inflated or Hamas-fabricated. The UN has independently verified the ministry's casualty figures from past Gaza bombardments back to 2008. The ministry's post-7 October dataset includes full names, dates of birth, gender and ID numbers for confirmed victims. Errors were few amid destruction of Gaza's health system and were corrected. Sky News reported a drop in entries with missing or invalid ID numbers from 2,769 to 313 by late July. External investigations found the published data withstood scrutiny.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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