Palestinian health authorities say Israel’s ground and air campaign in Gaza has killed more than 39,000 people, mostly civilians, and driven most of the enclave’s 2.3 million people from their homes.
The official Health Ministry count as of Thursday, July 25, was 39,175 Palestinian dead.
This explainer examines how the Palestinian toll is calculated, how reliable it is, the breakdown of civilians and fighters killed and what each side says.
HOW DO GAZA HEALTH AUTHORITIES CALCULATE THE DEATH TOLL?
In the first months of the war, death tolls were calculated entirely from counting bodies that arrived in hospitals and data included names and identity numbers for most of those killed.
As the conflict ground on, and fewer hospitals and morgues continued to operate, the authorities adopted other methods too.
From early May, the Health Ministry updated its breakdown of total fatalities to include unidentified bodies which account for nearly a third of the overall toll. Omar Hussein Ali, head of the ministry’s emergency operations centre in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, said these were bodies that had arrived at hospitals or medical centres without personal data such as identity numbers or full names.
