Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, whether his Department uses Gaza Health Ministry statistics in its Cross Whitehall Briefings.

Like many of our partners, we use data from the 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 Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) has consulted experts, including from the London School of Tropical Medicine and Every Casualty Counts. Experts assess that the total number of deaths in Gaza since 7 October 2023 estimated by the Gaza Ministry of Health is a reasonable figure, though numbers of those still under rubble, and still missing, is not yet known.