At a press conference on October 25, PBS Newshour reporter Laura Barrón-López asked US President Joe Biden a stark question. More than 6,000 Palestinian deaths had been reported in Gaza since October 7, she said. Did this suggest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was ignoring Biden’s message to avoid civilian deaths?
In his response, Biden questioned whether the fatality numbers, which came from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Ministry of Health, accurately captured the reality on the ground. “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed,” he said.
Biden’s remarks were met with intense anger by some commentators who found them overly dismissive of death and suffering; others noted Biden’s own administration has been relying on those figures internally throughout and before the conflict.
Two days later, in an unusual move this early in a conflict and seemingly in response to Biden’s remarks, Gaza’s Ministry of Health released a list containing the names and identity numbers of the nearly 7,000 people it says have died in the conflict so far.
Historically, the Gaza Health Ministry’s figures have been found largely accurate. News organizations, human rights groups, and international governments and bodies (including the United Nations) cite them in the moment; and human rights groups that have worked to verify the ministry’s data in previous conflicts have found it generally reliable. Vox reports these figures, as it reports the Israeli government’s stated death tolls.
For those occupying a grim corner at the intersection of political science and epidemiology, lists like these are just the beginning. “When we’re in the midst of something, it’s really, really hard to know” exactly how many have been killed, said Therese Pettersson, a senior analyst and research coordinator at the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), a Swedish organization that has been gathering and publishing…
Read the full article here
