Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, whether the National Security Secretariat uses Gaza Health Ministry statistics in its cross-Whitehall briefings.

NSS does use Gaza Health Ministry casualty figures for briefing.

It is difficult to verify casualty statistics accurately during an active conflict. FCDO and CO rely on the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reports which use figures issued from the Gazan Ministry of Health (MoH).

Over the course of this conflict FCDO has consulted experts from the London School of Tropical Medicine, OCHA, WHO and Every Casualty Counts, and assesses that the total number of deaths in Gaza since 7 October 2023 is a reliable figure. The MoH collates information on casualty statistics using a health information system derived from eight major hospitals across the Strip. They verify and identify the dead by age, gender and ID number.