Tag: Herzi Halevi

 According to Zaher Al Wahidi, director of the GMoH’s Health Information Center, hospitals in the South of Gaza lost access to the civil registry, and hospitals in the North saw their computer systems completely destroyed by Israeli forces. With no access to the civil registry, staff in Southern hospitals had to manually enter details of deaths. In the North, with no computer systems at all, hospital staff relied on paper records when they could, or more often, when the hospital was overwhelmed with casualties and medical staff displaced or dead, non-medical staff helped count the dead as they passed through the hospital without being able to identify them, at best tagging and photographing bodies for later identification. These headcount numbers representing unidentified fatalities were added to the deaths appearing on the detailed lists, resulting in the official reported death toll.

To help address these issues, the GMoH introduced an online portal launched in January 2024 for families to report deaths. This online form allows family members to provide details of individual deaths of loved ones, including whether the body passed through a hospital, in which case one unidentified death would be subtracted from the total death toll. If instead, the form indicated that the body was buried without hospital involvement or was missing (because, for example, it was still under the rubble), additional deaths would be added to the total from the hospitals. A judicial process was established in October 2024 to ensure that any deaths claimed via the online form were verifiable in order for families to obtain formal death certificates; until then, the GMoH added all deaths submitted via the form to their totals without judicial review, leading to subsequent removals of previously recorded deaths if formal verification proved unachievable. Finally, as the central collection system was gradually restored by mid-2024, errors like missing IDs or typos were fixed, thus improving the overall quality of their releases.