The number of victims from Israel’s bombings against the Gaza Strip, controlled by the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, has risen to 7,326 dead and 18,967 injuredThe Gaza Ministry of Health reported this Friday. Among the deceased are 3,038 minors, 1,726 women and 414 elderly people, who have lost their lives since last October 7. However, Israel and the United States do not believe the figureswhich the UN, Fatah, Human Rights Watch and the Red Crescent do support.

The ministry has indicated that only in In the last few hours, Israeli aviation has killed 298 people, most displaced in the southern part of the Strip. He also added that at least 57 health institutions have been targeted by Israeli bombing since the beginning of the war and that there are at least 12 hospitals and 32 primary care centers out of service as a result of the attacks and lack of fuel.

The president of the United States, Joe Biden, has assured that “does not trust in the figures that the Palestinians are using.” The president has questioned them without providing evidence that these data are false. The Gaza Ministry of Health responds with a list of more than 200 pages with the names and personal information of the victims who appear in its death toll due to the bombings. Hamas has published a list with the names of 6,747 people who died in Gaza between October 7 and 26 by Israeli bombings, and has added which does not include 281 deceased who could not be identified.

The figures are from the Strip Government, controlled by Hamas, yes. But the data comes from the hospitals, which are collapsed and caring for patients in terrible conditions. There is no Not a bed is free in the ICU in some hospitals. Like everyone else in the Strip, they register in a database every patient who dies there and every body that arrives at the morgue. The ministry also collects data from agencies such as the Red Crescent. Hamas figures fit the government of Fatah, in the West Bank, and also to Human Rights Watch.

Both are consistent with the destruction that the bombings are causing. And in the specific attacks they have investigated, their figures are comparable to those of Hamas. This is not the first Gaza war. In the previous ones, Hamas also gave the figures and they are almost the same as those later offered by the UN, the result of independent investigations. Precisely that, Independent observers are missing these days in the Strip because Israel does not allow the press to enter.

At a press conference this Friday in Jerusalem, the commissioner general of the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini, was asked about the reliability of the figures offered by Hamas. “In the last five, six cycles of conflict in the Gaza Strip, the numbers were considered credible, no one dared to question the figures“Lazzarin recalled.