Written question asked by Michael Ellis (Conservative) on Tuesday, 19 March 2024, in the House of Commons. It was due for an answer on Thursday, 21 March 2024. It was answered by Andrew Mitchell (Conservative) on Wednesday, 27 March 2024 on behalf of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

Gaza: Israel

Question: To ask the Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, what assessment he has made of the potential implications for his policies of the analysis of casualty figures in Gaza by the Professor of Statistics and Data Science at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, published on 7 March 2024.

Answer: Like many of our partners, we routinely use reports from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) to monitor daily figures for casualties in Gaza. OCHA rely on reporting from the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza. Casualty figures are only one data point of many we use to understand the scale of the conflict and its impact on civilians. Satellite imagery of building damage, eye-witness accounts from hospitals and data on living conditions all feed into our assessment.

Secondary information