Many of those listed as war fatalities in Gaza actually died of natural causes or did not die at all, a Palestinian health official working for Hamas admitted on Saturday, following an analysis that showed massive discrepancies in casualty tallies.

The head of the statistics team at Gaza’s Hamas-controlled health ministry, Zaher al-Wahidi, made the admission to Sky News after an analysis by the HonestReporting nonprofit last week found that some 3,400 individuals listed as war casualties in earlier tallies had been dropped from the ministry’s latest update.

Comparing the October and August tallies to the March one, HonestReporting researcher Salo Aizenberg found “around 3,400 names missing” from the latest one, “including over 1,000 minors,” he told JNS.

“We realized that a lot of people died a natural death,” Wahidi told Sky News regarding the October tally. “Maybe they were near an explosion and they had a heart attack, or houses caused them pneumonia or hypothermia. All these cases we don’t [attribute to] the war,” he said.

According to Sky News, 1,852 people appearing in October’s official list of war fatalities were removed from the March one after it was found that some had died of natural causes or were alive but had been imprisoned. In total, 3,952 names have been removed in several corrections from Gaza’s reported death toll since the war began, according to the outlet.

Whereas the Gaza Health Ministry had previously admitted error that it attributed to reporting mechanism issues, it had not conceded that natural deaths were counted along with war casualties.

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