The Biden administration is at odds with both the United Nations and international health organizations over whether to trust the death toll from the Hamas-controlled Palestinian Health Ministry.
Israel has conducted thousands of airstrikes into the Gaza Strip in the roughly three weeks since Hamas, the U.S.-designated terrorist organization and de facto government of Gaza, carried out the worst terror attacks in Israeli history, leaving roughly 1,400 people dead. The death toll is attributable to Israeli leaders.
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The Gaza Health Ministry said on Friday that the death toll has exceeded 7,300 in the Israeli strikes and more than 3,000 of the victims were children. But the ministry is run by Hamas, which has an incentive to exaggerate the death toll, particularly of civilians, to control the narrative of the war in the international media.
“I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using,” President Joe Biden said this week, which sparked outrage among pro-Palestinian groups, though he acknowledged that "innocents have been killed."
Administration officials doubled down on the president's claims in the ensuing days.
"We all know that the Gazan Ministry of Health is just a front for Hamas. It’s run by Hamas, a terrorist organization. I’ve said it myself up here: We can’t take anything coming out of Hamas, including the so-called Ministry of Health, at face value," National Security Council coordinator John Kirby said on Thursday, though he conceded that the administration "would not dispute" that thousands have been killed in Gaza.
The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees said Hamas’s death toll figures have been “credible” in previous conflicts in response to the administration's claims.
“In the past, the five, six cycles of conflict in the Gaza Strip, these figures were considered as credible, and no one ever really challenged these figures,” United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East chief Philippe Lazzarini said, according to the Times of Israel.
Similarly, Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch, said that “everyone uses the figures from the Gaza Health Ministry because those are generally proven to be reliable,” according to the Washington Post. “In the times in which we have done our own verification of numbers for particular strikes, I’m not aware of any time which there’s been some major discrepancy.”
Shortly after Biden's remarks, the Health Ministry released a document it said contained a list of names of the dead, though it did not specify civilian vs combatant deaths. The list could not be independently verified, in part because Gaza has been closed to outside journalists.
The war between Israel and Hamas has quickly become enveloped by misinformation and disinformation. One of the most notable examples occurred on Oct. 17, when Hamas accused Israel of targeting the al Ahli Hospital in Gaza and almost immediately declared that about 500 people were killed in the strike. But both the Israelis and U.S. officials confirmed in the aftermath that the strike hadn't been fired by Israel but was a failed rocket launched from Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a smaller Gaza-based terrorist organization. The strike also did not directly hit the hospital but landed in the parking lot next to it.
"Well, do you remember that attack on the hospital? And what did the Gaza Ministry of Health put out? Something like 500? They slapped the number of 500 on it, you know, within the hour of — of that attack. And, of course, they — the same Ministry of Health said it was an Israeli airstrike, so we know that’s not true," Kirby added. "And we’ve now since found out that the numbers aren’t that high, either. They never got up to 500."
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Hamas's claim that Israel was responsible for the hospital bombing led to anti-Israel protests breaking out across the Middle East.
The State Department cited the Health Ministry's death toll statistics in a report published months ago.