The Gaza Ministry of Health cannot provide names of more than 10,000 of the 34,000 individuals it says have died during the war between Israel and Hamas. While the Health Ministry conceded earlier this month that it has “incomplete data” for nearly one-third of the deceased, this is the first admission that it lacks an essential data point necessary to establish these deaths have even taken place.

The Gaza Health Ministry is an arm of the Hamas-run government in Gaza. On April 24, to mark the 200th day of the war Hamas started, the ministry released a graphic in which it reiterated the claim that hostilities have taken more than 34,000 lives, adding that only 24,000 of the dead are “martyrs whose idintities [sic] are recognized.” On April 28, a Wall Street Journal story about the ministry’s data confirmed, “Around 10,000 people included in the Health Ministry’s official death toll haven’t been identified.”

At the outset of the war, the ministry compiled casualty figures by collecting information from Gaza hospitals, which provided the names of the deceased. When Israeli military operations disrupted the ministry’s communication with medical facilities in Gaza, the ministry began to rely on what it described as “reliable media sources” for information about possible deaths. The ministry neither identified these sources nor the criteria according to which it assessed the credibility of their information.

The proportion of data derived from media sources increased sharply as the war progressed. As of December 31, the ministry reported 6,629 deaths based on media information, or 30.2 percent of the total at the time. During the first three months of 2024, media sources accounted for an additional 8,441 deaths, or 77.7 percent of all fatalities reported during the first quarter.