Judging by the past experiences, there will be post-war investigations - the number will be somewhat revised down, so that Hamas, Israel and Red cross or UN estimations agree (Hamas definitely does some double counting to add to the international pressure on Israel, but the order-of-the-magnitude is probably correct). The main dispute is usually about how many of those were combatants.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs clearly states that any data might be available only after the end of the hostilities:
Casualties in the context of the ongoing hostilities in the Gaza Strip and Israel, which started on 7 October 2023, will only be added to this page once these incidents have been independently verified. Until then, reported figures on those are included in our Flash Updates and Snapshots. By contrast, data on casualties in the West Bank and Israel in other contexts is updated regularly beyond 7 October 2023.
The cited Snapshot reports the Palestinian casualties with reference to [Hamas] Ministry of Health, Government Media Office.
The situation is by no means unique:
- the presence and security of any independent bodies is dependent on the permission and protection of the military force controlling an area. This makes independent work impossible.
- collection of information about casualties requires systematic observation, systematization of information, centralized records processing, cross-checking of records, etc. In a chaotic situation this may well be impossible - that is, Hamas might simply have no numbers available even for their internal purposes.
This situation is not unique to this conflict. Indeed, the US equally had difficulties counting the enemy and civilian casualties in Iraq: A NATION AT WAR: THE CASUALTIES; U.S. Military Has No Count Of Iraqi Dead In Fighting:
But how many Iraqi soldiers have died?
It could be scores, hundreds, even thousands. No one outside Iraq -- and probably no one there, either -- knows. As in the Persian Gulf war in 1991 and in Afghanistan, the American military is not counting.
American officials say numbering the enemy dead in the midst of battle is dangerous and ultimately fruitless. They say it is not a statistic that interests them. They speak in lifeless terms of ''degrading'' or ''attriting'' enemy military formations, so they can assess the strength of the force opposing them. They count destroyed tanks and artillery pieces and missile launchers. They count captured weapons. They do not count people, civilian or military.
''You know, we don't do body counts,'' Gen. Tommy R. Franks said a year ago in response to reports that American bombing killed 1,000 Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters in the Afghanistan campaign of 2001-02.
Remarks:
Indeed, in the past there have been instances in this conflict when the casualties were greatly exaggerated, notably the Battle of Jenin (2002):
On April 7, senior Palestinian official Saeb Erekat suggested to CNN that some 500 Palestinians had been killed in the camp. Five days later, when the fighting stopped, PA Secretary Ahmed Abdel Rahman told UPI that the number was in the thousands. Stories of hundreds of civilians being killed in their homes as they were demolished spread throughout international media. Subsequent investigations found no evidence to substantiate claims of a massacre, and official totals from Palestinian and Israeli sources confirmed between 52 and 54 Palestinians, including civilians, and 23 IDF soldiers as having been killed in the fighting.
Another famous case of exaggerated claims was Bernie Sanders' gaffe about 10,000 Palestinians killed in 2014 Gaza war, made during the 2016 election campaign:
“Anybody help me out here, because I don’t remember the figures, but my recollection is over 10,000 innocent people were killed in Gaza. Does that sound right?” he said first.
Told that the number was “probably high,” Sanders responded: “I don’t have it in my number… but I think it’s over 10,000. My understanding is that a whole lot of apartment houses were leveled,” he went on. “Hospitals, I think, were bombed. So yeah, I do believe and I don’t think I’m alone in believing that Israel’s force was more indiscriminate than it should have been.”
[...]
According to Palestinian figures cited by the UN Human Rights Council, 1,462 civilians were killed out of a total of the 2,251 Gaza fatalities during the 51-day conflict. Israel, for its part, has said that up to half of those killed on the Palestinian side were combatants, and has blamed the civilian death toll on Hamas for deliberating placing rocket launches, tunnels and other military installations among civilians. Seventy-three people were killed on the Israeli side of the conflict.
In the follow-up it transpired that Sanders generally had poor grasp of the facts related to Israel, as he didn't know who was Michael Oren (the Israeli Ambassador to the US at the time.)
Related: Why are statements from the "Gaza Health Ministry" taken without a grain of salt?
