The Gaza Health Ministry (GHM), officially the Palestinian Ministry of Health – Gaza, is responsible for managing healthcare and medical services in the Gaza Strip. The health ministry's casualty reports have received significant attention during the course of the Gaza–Israel conflict. Its numbers have historically been considered reliable by the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and Human Rights Watch. In relation to the Gaza war, two letters published in The Lancet journal did not find evidence of inflation or fabrication of Palestinian casualty numbers. A peer-reviewed analysis published by The Lancet in January 2025 concluded the GHM had undercounted deaths due to traumatic injury by 41% in its reports on the Gaza war, with the total estimated traumatic injury deaths as of October 2024 probably exceeding 70,000 as opposed to the GHM's reported 41,909—59.1% of them being women and children and the elderly. Another independent peer-reviewed analysis of casualties was published in The Lancet by Michael Spagat and other researchers. They estimated 75,200 violent deaths and 8,540 excess non-violent deaths between 7 October 2023 and 5 January 2025. The estimate of violent deaths is 34.7% higher than the GHM's casualty count at the time. Of the violent deaths, the researchers estimate that 56.2% were women, children, and elderly individuals.
History The Palestinian territories are served by parallel ministries of health operating in Gaza and the West Bank, overseen by a single government ministry of health based in Ramallah. Following Hamas' takeover of Gaza in 2007, the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip has appointed its own alternate health ministers, but the Palestinian Authority (PA) retains power over it, paying salaries and supplying it with medical equipment.
A month-long doctors' strike ensued after Hamas' takeover of Gaza, due to political disputes. The new Gaza government, with Basem Naim as Health Minister, replaced Fatah-affiliated hospital directors and staff with those identifying with Hamas. Jomaa Alsaqqa, a 20-year surgeon at al-Shifa Hospital, lost his job due to his Fatah support and faced arrests and assaults since the Hamas takeover. In response, Naim stated "the hospital managers weren't fired for political reasons: they were fired because of managerial, financial, and moral corruption in the hospitals." In 2023 officials said the ministry is a mix of recent Hamas hires and older civil servants affiliated with the secular nationalist Fatah party.
The current director-general of the Gaza Health Ministry is Medhat Abbas.
On 17 November 2023, amid the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip, the head of Médecins Sans Frontières in Palestine stated the Gaza Health Ministry had been "decimated", and Gaza's health sector had been "systematically destroyed".
A July 2026 article published in The Daily Telegraph reported on claims that ministry officials were accepting bribes to put healthy people on a list of those requiring evacuation for medical treatment abroad or to move sick people to higher positions on the list. The Health Ministry stated that a process to "verify medical cases" would be created, in response to the claims.Nuki, Paul. "Gaza officials ‘taking bribes’ to let healthy people on medical flights", The Daily Telegraph, July 2, 2026. Accessed July 5, 2026. "According to the allegations, which have not been proved, bribery within the strip is corrupting the way in which sick and injured patients are prioritised for receiving medical help overseas. In some cases, healthy people are said to have acquired forged medical papers by saying they require evacuation on medical grounds. In others, officials are said to have pushed genuinely sick patients up the queue in return for bribes.... The Ministry of Health in Gaza said it intended to create a committee to 'verify medical cases' in the wake of the allegations of bribery."
Casualty reports + Gaza Health Ministry (GHM) fatality reportage deviation+ 2008–2021. Conflict According to GHM According to the UN Deviation Gaza War (2008–2009) 1,440 1,385 4.0% 2014 Gaza War 2,310 2,251 2.6% 2021 Israel–Palestine crisis 260 256 1.6%
As of 26 October 2023, the Gaza Health Ministry (GHM) was the sole official source of data on Palestinian casualties in Gaza during the Gaza war, although these numbers are also published by the West Bank-based Palestinian health ministry, which confirms them with its Gaza-based staff. The health ministry's numbers have historically been considered reliable by the United Nations, the World Health Organization, Human Rights Watch. The United States Department of State cited its numbers in a public report in March 2023.
The casualty figures provided by the ministry do not distinguish the difference between civilians and combatants or provide the cause of death. The percentage of civilian deaths is only calculated post-conflict by the UN and various rights groups.
Methodology The sources for the GHM casualty data include death counts from hospitals, media reports (subsequently denied by the ministry) and a publicly available online form which allows families to record deaths.
The GHM released a full list of the people killed at the time since 7 October, a 200-page document with 6,747 identified individuals listing their names, ages, and ID number as well as 281 unidentified victims. Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch, said "the numbers coming out of the ministry are not beyond reason", and noted a grey area in differentiating combatants from civilians among the dead, as well as emphasized that immediately released figures may often be different from those ultimately based on recorded data.
Palestinian political analyst Nour Odeh has asserted the process of issuing death certificates is not done by political figures, but by health professionals, insisting "this process enables families to deal with issues such as inheritance and custody of children whose parents have died." Director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, Ahmed al-Kahlot, denied that the GHM was unduly influenced by Hamas' control, stating that "Hamas is one of the factions. Some of us are aligned with Fatah, some are independent." and "More than anything, we are medical professionals."
As of 29 February 2024, the Gaza Health Ministry stated that its daily tallies now rely upon "a combination of accurate death counts from hospitals that are still partially operating, and on estimates from media reports to assess deaths in the north of Gaza", but did not "cite or say which sources those are." On 31 March, it stated that 15,070 fatalities (45.8% of the then total) had been compiled via "reliable media sources" instead of direct reporting. The Ministry further clarified in reports made on 1 April and 4 April that it had “incomplete data” for 12,263 (later reduced 11,371) of its 33,091 reported fatalities.
The methodology for the counts was outlined by Health Information Center head Zaher al-Wahaidi in April 2024. The destruction and disruption of Gaza's health infrastructure had left only three of the eight hospitals responsible for reporting deaths able to contribute data, forcing the ministry to rely increasingly on journalists and first responders to record otherwise unidentified fatalities. The ministry also introduced remote registration through an online form and by phone. Confirmed submissions were used to identify deaths already represented in the unidentified tally, with a corresponding unidentified death removed rather than an additional death being added to the overall count. al-Wahaidi said that 55% of those identified through this system were men, largely because widows used it to register their husbands' deaths in order to obtain government assistance. Sky News said its analysis did not suggest that unidentified fatalities were being used to inflate the overall death toll, while Human Rights Watch's Omar Shakir said the reported toll was probably an undercount.
By August 2024, al-Wahaidi reported that the ministry's casualty-recording system had substantially recovered. He clarified that the phrase previously translated as "reliable media sources" was actually "reliable sources", and said the ministry did not rely on press reports for its casualty data. All of Gaza's major functioning hospitals had been reconnected to the Health Information Centre's central database and could again transmit detailed information automatically. The ministry was also using an online registration system for deaths that had not previously been fully identified. Of fatalities reported through the form in July, 55% had passed through a hospital but remained unidentified, 22% had been buried without reaching a hospital, and 23% were missing or presumed to be under the rubble. Before a reported death was confirmed, the family was required to present the case to a judicial committee and the public prosecutor verified that the death had occurred and resulted from the war rather than natural causes. If the deceased had already passed through a hospital, a corresponding entry was removed from the unidentified tally, preventing the confirmation from increasing the overall count a second time. By 6 August, 6,187 deaths had been confirmed through the online system, while the proportion of unidentified fatalities had fallen from 46% on 31 March to 18%. Paul Spiegel, director of the Center for Humanitarian Health at Johns Hopkins University, said that many deaths remained uncounted and noted that the ministry reported only traumatic deaths, excluding increased indirect mortality from causes such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and maternal deaths. He therefore considered the reported toll likely an underestimate.
In April 2025, al-Wahaidi said that many names submitted through the online form had been removed from published updates as a precaution pending judicial investigation. He said some were found to have died of natural causes, while others were alive but imprisoned or were missing without sufficient evidence that they had died. Until October 2024, names submitted through the form could be added to the published list before undergoing judicial confirmation. Since October, submissions had undergone judicial confirmation before publication. Gabriel Epstein of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy said there's no reason to think the errors are due to deliberate manipulation to inflate the number of women and children among the casualties as the precautionary removals only slightly reduced the share of women and children in the official list. Professor Michael Spagat of research group Action on Armed Violence (AOAV) concurred with this, stating that he did not detect an attempt to mislead by health officials while seeing the changes as "a big clean-up operation".
Analysis by academic researchers Two letters published in The Lancet found that the GHM numbers were plausible and credible: the first was authored by scholars at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and the second by scholars at Johns Hopkins University. The Johns Hopkins University letter verified GHM reported deaths by looking at the UNRWA's reported deaths of its staff members. The UNRWA reported deaths are also publicly available, and independent of the GHM casualty reports. The authors found that the GHM reported death rate (5.3 deaths per 1000) was consistent with data reported by UNRWA (7.8 deaths per 1000, as of 10 November 2023). It also found temporal consistency between the two independent reports.