Israel-Hamas war: 215 of 649 pages are just children; Gaza health ministry releases names of victims

Gaza health ministry has identifiedover 34,000 Palestinians that have been killed in the almost one-year-long, ongoing war between Hamas and Israel. It has published a 649-page exhaustive list of the victims.

Victims of Gaza war

The list released by the Gaza health ministry contains the names, ages, genders, and ID numbers of more than 80 per cent or 34,344 victims of the war.

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It also mentions 7,613 other people that have perished in the war, and whose bodies were received by the hospitals and morgues in the territory but whose identities are yet to be confirmed. The total death toll on the Palestinian side has crossed 41,000 as per reports.

Among the dead are 169 babies who were born after the Hamas militant group's Oct 7 attack, and an over one-hundred-year-old man — born in 1922 — a survivor of more than a century of war and upheaval who didn't survive this war.

Gone too soon: Children killed in Israel-Hamas war

The 649-page-long document lists the dead largely by age. It underlines the shockingly high toll of Israeli attacks on Palestinian children, with over a hundred pages of the list filled with victims under the age of 10.

Shockingly, the first adult name in the impossibly long list does not appear until page 215.

While the list contains names of both civilians and fighters, because of their age and gender, the majority of those dead can be identified as civilians. The list of dead Palestinians includes 11,355 children, 6,297 women and 2,955 people aged 60 or older. Among the men, surely many are civilians of fighting age who died in the ongoing war.

Israel refutes the high death toll

Israel officials have repeatedly questioned the death toll and argue that the Hamas-controlled government and its officials are not providing reliable figures.

However, according to the reports, the doctors and the civil servants in the territory have proven the credibility of their records in previous wars. During the many conflicts between 2009 and 2021, a tally by the United Nations closely matched the ones from Gaza.

In May, Farhan Haq, a spokesperson for the UN secretary-general when questioned about the numbers had said,"Unfortunately, we have the sad experience of coordinating with the Ministry of Health on casualty figures every few years for large mass casualty incidents in Gaza; and in past times, their figures have proven to be generally accurate."

(With inputs from agencies)