Biden casts doubt on casualty figures in Gaza provided by Palestinian officials
Gaza’s health ministry answered Biden with a 212-page list of the dead.
US President Joe Biden has cast doubt on casualty figures provided by Palestinian officials in Gaza!
“I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s a price of waging a war,” US President Biden said at a press conference on Wednesday. “But I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.”
The U.S. president did not offer any further evidence for his skepticism of the Palestinian health ministry’s data, which the U.S. State Department has cited both internally and publicly, in the latter case as recently as March.
Joe Biden has sparked fury after he expressed "no confidence" in the reported Palestinian death count in Gaza. pic.twitter.com/nZEW4n57gg
— Newsweek (@Newsweek) October 26, 2023
As reported, when asked to provide evidence to support Biden’s statement, the White House referred TIME to comments made by U.S. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby, who on Thursday reiterated the President’s assertion that the death toll cannot be taken “at face value” because the “Gaza Ministry of Health is just a front for Hamas.”
Palestinian officials have released a list of 6747 names in response to President Biden’s casting doubt on the Palestinian death toll in Gaza.
The 212-page document included the name, age, sex, and official identification number of 6,747 people who according to Palestinian officials have been killed in Gaza since Israel began its airstrikes there on Oct. 7.
The document noted that the list does not include the 281 dead who are yet to be identified.
On the other hand, the UN and other international agencies comment that there can be small discrepancies between the final casualty numbers and those reported by the Gaza health ministry straight after the attacks, but that they broadly trust them.
“We continue to include their data in our reporting and it is clearly sourced,” the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a statement to Reuters.
“It is nearly impossible at the moment to provide any UN verification on a day-to-day basis.”
Dr Mike Ryan, Executive Director of the Geneva-based World Health Organisation’s (WHO) Health Emergencies Programme, said last week that figures released by both sides “may not be perfectly accurate on a minute-to-minute basis, but they grossly reflect the level of death and injury on both sides of that conflict.”
