Gaza- Like a beehive, the employees of the Health Information Systems Unit at the Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip are working to follow up on events moment by moment, and verify the data of the martyrs before registering them and officially approving them on the lists of martyrs of the bloody Israeli war, which will complete its first year on October 7.
The ministry has several sources for obtaining data related to the martyr, the location and timing of the attack, and this information is subject to verification methods before it is officially approved. Despite this, the occupation has repeatedly cast doubt on the figures of the ministry and other government institutions in Gaza regarding the martyrs of the Israeli massacres, the latest of which was the horrific massacre of the displaced persons’ tents in the Mawasi area of Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip.
The occupation exploited two different numbers of martyrs in the massacre to cast doubt on the credibility and accuse the official bodies in Gaza of “lying.” The first number was 19 martyrs and was issued by the Ministry of Health, while the government media office announced that the number exceeded 40. So why this big difference?
Documentation sources
This question is answered by the Director of the Health Information Systems Unit, Engineer Zaher Al-Wahidi, who leads a group that works day and night at the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Yunis, in order to document the data of the martyrs.
He told Tel Aviv Tribune Net that the Ministry of Health has a policy based on the martyrs who reach it, meaning that everyone who reaches its hospitals, whether they are unknown or known martyrs, is registered and counted.
He added that they rely on several sources to document and record data, which are:
- Computerized system (e hospital): through data sent from emergency departments in hospitals affiliated with the Ministry of Health.
- A data model they obtain from field and private hospitals that provide emergency services to war victims who reach them.
- An electronic link launched by the Ministry to report martyrs and missing persons whose families and relatives were unable to transport them to government or private hospitals and who remained under the rubble and were not buried.
This data and information is processed, audited, verified, and ensured to be accurate and free of duplication and repetition. Then, the Ministry of Health issues two numbers for each update of the martyrs’ data:
- the first: Specific to the total number of martyrs who arrived at government, private or field hospitals, which is the number announced to date and exceeds 41 thousand martyrs, according to Al-Wahidi.
- the second: It is estimated that there are about 34,400 martyrs, and they are complete in their data, whose names, ID number, gender, and date of birth are available. Al-Wahidi says that this data helps the ministry to have accurate statistics on the martyrs according to age group, gender, and place of the event.
Martyrs are of different types.
Regarding the data reported by the martyrs’ families via an electronic link, Al-Wahidi explains that it is being treated as preliminary data, and its number is estimated at around 8,000 reports so far. A judicial committee has been formed in the north of the Strip and another in the south to look into these reports.
According to the same source, text messages are sent to all informants nominated to meet with the committee, whose mission is to prove the death sentence by the judges and verify whether the death was caused directly or indirectly by the occupation, or whether it was natural and not related to the war.
The Ministry of Health’s policy, adopted since the outbreak of the aggression, is to count martyrs as a result of direct injuries resulting from the war, whether by gunfire or shelling, i.e. direct targeting only, while indirect causes of death are postponed until after the war.
Until then, Al-Wahidi says, the ministry considers it a natural death, such as the death of children due to malnutrition, the deaths of kidney dialysis and tumor patients due to the lack of treatment, heart attacks due to fear and shock, and patients referred for treatment abroad who were prevented from traveling, as these are not included in the lists of martyrs.
The committee consists of judges, criminal evidence, general investigations, the Ministry of Health, and the Public Prosecution. Its mandate is to verify that the event occurred at the place and date specified in the electronic report from the martyr’s family, based on witness testimony and the indication of the police and investigations department at the time.
Its tasks also include verifying whether the event led to deaths directly from the occupation. If this is confirmed, the name reported is adopted as a war martyr, or it is decided to adopt it as a natural death, or the consideration is postponed until after the war due to the judge’s uncertainty about the death being proven, i.e. he may have been missing or captured and the death has not been proven conclusively.
According to Al-Wahidi, the data received from the hospitals is then matched with that approved by the committee, and reviewed for repetition and verification of the accuracy of personal data and the place and date of the event, before the official publication on a regular and monthly basis via infographics and a detailed disclosure of information about each martyr.
To demonstrate the accuracy of the data issued by the Ministry of Health, Al-Wahidi confirms that the United Nations and prominent international bodies and institutions such as the World Health Organization and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) rely on the official reports issued by the Ministry regarding the situation in the Gaza Strip, and these are highly credible reports.
The credibility of the numbers
Al-Wahidi does not care about the continued Israeli skepticism about this data, and refutes the allegations of exaggeration and discrepancy in the numbers, especially with those issued by the government media office.
He confirms that what the ministry published does not reflect the real numbers of war victims, and the numbers approved so far are less by a percentage ranging between 15 and 20% than the actual number of martyrs.
For his part, the Director General of the Government Media Office, Ismail Al-Thawabta, confirms what Engineer Al-Wahidi said, and denies the existence of any contradiction regarding the circulated numbers of martyrs.
He says – in an explanatory statement – that the Ministry of Health adopts the protocol in effect according to the World Health Organization, according to which the martyrs who arrive at the hospitals are identified and subjected to medical examination and procedures to verify their martyrdom, and they are placed in refrigerators and then handed over to their families for burial.
As for the government media office, when it announces the numbers of martyrs, it includes – in addition to the ministry’s numbers – those who are still under the rubble or sand. The latest of these examples – according to the constants – is the massacre of the Mawasi tents, last Tuesday morning, which left more than 40 martyrs, 19 of whom arrived at the ministry’s hospitals.
He confirmed that they have 22 names of martyrs who were in the focus of the bombing and targeting, and their bodies evaporated and became a trace from afar, and melted due to the force of the explosions caused by 3 giant bombs that targeted their tents.
Al-Thawabta added that they have not found any trace – until this moment – of the bodies of the residents of these targeted tents who were in the eye of the bombing, and that they rely in their reports on the total number of martyrs whose names and personal information they have, and not only those whose bodies they verify according to the Ministry of Health protocol.