For months, Hamas health and information officials have been providing daily updates on the rising death toll and countless injuries during the ongoing conflict in Gaza. Aid agencies, media outlets, and many world leaders, including President Biden, have readily quoted those figures without question. However, a recent heated debate erupted after the U.N. admitted that the data coming out of Gaza could not be verified.
Since Israeli troops entered Gaza on Oct. 27, three weeks after thousands of terrorists led by Hamas attacked southern Israel, most of those affiliated with the Iranian-backed, U.S.-designated terrorist organization have since taken up arms, fighting from within civilian population centers both above ground and below ground, where the group spent some two decades and billions of dollars constructing an estimated 300 miles of subterranean passageways.
At the start of the war, medical officials employed by Hamas monitored the quickly mounting death toll via a network of computers connecting morgues and hospitals throughout the territory, a system that had previously been validated by human rights groups, the U.N. and the WHO. Previous conflicts had shown the overall death toll count, even though vetted by Hamas, which refuses to distinguish between civilians and combatants, to be fairly accurate.
"At the start of the war, the health ministry had a stream of casualty data coming in from hospitals across Gaza. That is why so many Western journalists said the ministry's data was worth citing in their articles and why the U.N. trusted it," David Adesnik, a senior fellow and director of research at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies who has been closely monitoring the situation in Gaza, told Fox News Digital.
"But, as Israeli troops moved deeper into Gaza, the ministry lost contact with hospitals. To compensate, it began using what it called ‘reliable media sources’ to determine the number of fatalities," he said, adding,"It never identified these sources and it’s a stretch to characterize any of the media in Gaza as reliable – instead of a supplement, these media reports began to provide the bulk of the media's data, accounting for more than 75% of all deaths recorded in the first three months of this year."
Adesnik said that over the past month, the Gaza Health Ministry began to "play down its reliance on media input" and relabeled the deaths based on media reports as "unidentified individuals."
"There are still more than 10,000 of these unidentified individuals in the ministry's official death toll of more than 35,000," he said. "But the big mystery is whether the ministry has any firm data at all on the 10,000-plus who’re unidentified."
"Even if you think the ministry was doing a good job at the beginning of the war collecting casualty data from hospitals, it’s shift to using ‘reliable media sources’ has seriously undermined its credibility," Adesnik added.
Also calling into question the reliability of the information coming out of Gaza is the fact that only a handful of Gaza’s 36 hospitals and primary health care facilities that operated pre-Oct.7 are still functioning in some capacity, according to a May 3 report published by the WHO.
Zaher al Wahaidi, who has led Hamas’ Health Information Centre for the past year, told Sky News last month that since February, the morgue monitoring system that was once in place has only been capturing a small fraction of the deaths across the territory.
"Of the eight major hospitals responsible for collating morgue data, just three are still providing information to the health ministry," Sky News reported.
Speaking to Fox News Digital last week, an official from the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), the Israeli military body that coordinates civilian issues in the Palestinian territories, said that the Hamas-run civilian offices in the Strip were still operating "because they are publishing data… mainly in order to put pressure on the international community."
In addition to the eight hospitals currently operating in Gaza, four in the north of the Strip, two in the center and two in the south, COGAT said there were an additional eight field hospitals, as well as some mobile medical units, being run by multiple countries and international organizations around the Strip. None of those facilities are part of the Hamas-run system.
"We have seen everything they [Hamas] are reporting from Gaza, and we also see that there is chaos in their reporting," the COGAT official said. "The numbers they publish are not right or accurate."
The official pointed to the example of the recent change in death toll figures for women and children, saying, "This shows how they are trying to take advantage of the situation and are manipulating the numbers for political reasons."
Abu Toameh said that the physical building that once housed Hamas’ Ministry of Health might still be standing
