Gaza's fatalities list is an explosive and controversial document. Critics claim the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry duplicates names, counts Hamas militants as civilians and inflates the number of women and minors. Haaretz took a deep dive into how the list of nearly 70,000 names was compiled to test those claims
The name Hind Rajab, possibly the most famous Palestinian victim of the war, appears on row 5,918 of the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry's list of fatalities. In January 2024, she was the sole survivor among seven people in her family's car as they tried to flee Gaza City at the orders of the IDF. For over two hours, she remained on the phone with her family and the Red Crescent, which dispatched paramedics to rescue her.
Eleven days later, her body was found in the car, which was riddled with hundreds of bullets. The bodies of the paramedics, Yousef al-Zeino and Ahmed al-Madhoun, were discovered in the bullet-riddled ambulance nearby. Their deaths are recorded later in the table, in rows 46,722 and 49,661.
Hind Rajab was 5 years and 8 months old when she died. Her position in row 5,918 means that 5,917 children younger than her were killed in the war. The first name in the table is Waad Sabbah, who was killed six weeks after Hind. She and 17 other newborns died within their first 24 hours. One hundred and fifteen children died before reaching one month. A total of 1,054 children died before their first birthday.
