Gaza’s Health Ministry reveals names of several thousand dead, over 11,355 of them are minors – Technologist

“Five minutes after getting the birth certificate, I was getting their death certificates.” On August 13, Muhammad Abu al-Qumsan, 33, had barely left the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, where he had just registered his twins, when he received a phone call asking him to turn back. On the spot, he discovered the bodies of his two children, Aseel and Aser, a boy and a girl born three days earlier and killed in the bombardment of their building in the city of Deir al-Balah, home to some of the 2 million Gazans displaced by the war. “I found them in a cold room, in the morgue,” he testified tearfully, filmed from a hospital corridor.

Aseel and Aser Abu al-Qumsan, identity numbers 470333964 and 470333980, are among the 710 children under the age of 1 who have died in Gaza since the start of the war, among a list of 34,344 Gazans who have lost their lives under the bombardments and have been identified by the local Ministry of Health as of August 31; 7,613 people, declared dead on arrival at the emergency room, have still not been identified.

First adult on page 215

Published on September 16, the 649-page document lists the dead, classified by age, national identity number, gender and date of birth. From Noura Walid Abdelsalam Shahine, “0 years old,” born on January 1, 2023, to Ahmad Ibrahim Al-Tahraoui, “101 years old,” born on January 1, 1922. It highlights the heavy toll among those under 18: 11,355 identified dead. It takes 115 pages before the identity of the first 10-year-old child appears; the first adult, an 18-year-old girl, does not appear until page 215. In March, Philippe Lazzarini, head of UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, sounded the alarm at the death toll among the youngest children, which he described as “staggering.” “The number of children reported killed in just over 4 months in Gaza is higher than the number of children killed in 4 years of wars around the world combined. This war is a war on children,” denounced Lazzarini. “It is a war on their childhood and their future.”

While the list published by the Ministry of Health on September 16 does not distinguish between civilians and fighters, over 60% of the dead are under 18, or over 60 or female.

Since the start of the war, the Gaza Strip’s Ministry of Health’s assessments have been regularly called into question by the Israeli authorities, who accuse Hamas of manipulating or even inflating the figures. The only source that establishes the assessments is the Ministry of Health in the Palestinian territory, placed de facto under the tutelage of the Islamist movement, which has administered the enclave since 2007. The Palestinian Authority, based in Ramallah, in the West Bank, also claims the daily reports are accurate. It pays the salaries of the civil servants who compile the data in Gaza and is responsible for monitoring it. On August 15, Israeli army spokesman Daniel Hagari said “more than 17,000 terrorists” had been killed in the Gaza Strip. No further details were given. The army did not respond to requests for comment from Le Monde. In May, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced “the death of 14,000 terrorists” and “about 16,000 civilians.”

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