Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the reliability of the war-related death statistics issued by the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza since 7 October 2023.

Like many of our partners, we use data from United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) to report on daily casualties in the current Gaza conflict. OCHA draws on figures issued from the Gazan Ministry of Health (MoH). Producing reliable casualty statistics in contexts of violent conflict is never straightforward. The MoH verifies and identifies each death by age, gender, and ID number. Previously, this methodology has been deemed sound by international academics. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) has consulted experts from the London School of Tropical Medicine, OCHA, World Health Organization (WHO) and Every Casualty Counts, and assesses that the total number of deaths in Gaza since 7 October 2023 estimated by OCHA is a reasonable figure, though numbers of those still missing are not yet known.