The health ministry in Gaza has released the names of nearly 7,000 Palestinians killed in Israel’s ongoing aggression on the besieged Strip, a day after US President Joe Biden “shamelessly” questioned the casualty figure.
Biden on Wednesday said he had “no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed.”
He confirmed that the Israeli aggression has killed “innocents”, but justified that, saying “it’s the price of waging a war.”
Refuting his remarks, the health ministry in Gaza published a 210-page report on Thursday, listing every Palestinian killed since Israel began the aggression on October 7.
It includes the names, ages, genders, and ID numbers of every victim, with an English version of the report expected to be published soon, according to the ministry.
Ashraf al-Qedra, a spokesman for the ministry, said the US administration was “devoid of human standards, morals and basic human rights values” for “shamelessly” casting doubt on the death toll.
“We decided to go out and announce, with details and names, and in front of the entire world, the truth about the genocidal war committed by the Israeli occupation against our people,” he said.
According to the report, 6,747 Palestinians were killed, including 2,913 children, between October 7 and 3 p.m. local time on October 26. The ministry said it did not name an additional 281 people who had been killed because their bodies could not be identified, bringing the total to 7,028.
The ministry also said the actual death toll is likely to be much higher than the announced figure as the report excludes those buried without being brought to the hospital, those for whom hospitals were unable to complete registration procedures, and people missing under the rubble, who number about 1,600, with many of them feared dead.
“We confirm that the doors of the Ministry of Health are open for all institutions to have access,” Qedra said in a statement.
“Let the world know that behind every number is the story of a person whose name and identity are known. Our people are not nobodies who can be ignored.”
Despite Biden questioning the accuracy of the casualty figure, the HuffPost revealed that the US State Department recently cited the Palestinian health ministry in Gaza in nearly 20 “situation reports”.
Biden’s remarks were decried by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) as “shocking and dehumanizing”. CAIR also stressed that Biden should apologize.
“Countless videos coming out of Gaza every day show mangled bodies of Palestinian women and children – and entire city blocks leveled to the ground,” Nihad Awad, CAIR’s executive director.
“President Biden should watch some of these videos and ask himself if the crushed children being dragged out of the ruins of their family homes are a fabrication or an acceptable price of war. They are neither.”
Israel launched the war on Gaza on October 7 after the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas waged the surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity in response to the Israeli regime’s decades-long campaign of bloodletting and devastation against Palestinians.
Tel Aviv has also blocked water, food, and electricity to Gaza, plunging the coastal strip into a humanitarian crisis.
The regime has further ordered 1.1 million people in the north of Gaza to evacuate and move south of the coastal sliver.
However, it has continued to rain down bombs on the south, killing large numbers of Palestinians.
The United Nations says about half of the Palestinians in Gaza have been made homeless, still trapped inside the besieged enclave.
The world body’s human rights office says Israel’s complete siege of Gaza, combined with the evacuation order, could amount to a forcible transfer of civilians, breaching international law.
