In the first six weeks of the conflict, hospital morgues across Gaza sent figures to the health ministry’s main collection centre at Al Shifa Hospital, Reuters reports.

Officials used Excel sheets to keep track of names, ages, and ID card numbers of the dead and transmitted these to the Palestinian Health Ministry in Ramallah, part of the Palestinian Authority (PA) that exercises limited self-rule in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

But Omar Hussein Ali, director of the Ramallah ministry’s emergency operations centre, said that of the four officials who ran the Shifa data centre, one died in an air strike that hit the hospital while the other three went missing when Israeli forces seized the premises as an alleged Hamas hideout.

“The kind of casualty recording required to understand what’s going on is getting harder. Information infrastructure, the health systems that existed, are being systematically destroyed,” said Hamit Dardagan of Iraq Body Count, set up during the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq.

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