TEHRAN- The Palestinian Ministry of health revised the death toll of Gazans killed by indiscriminate Israeli attacks, but the figure remains the same and most likely an undercount.

As Israeli occupation leaders leap to downplay the credibility of Gaza’s Health Ministry by accusing it of manipulating the number of dead, the United Nations has verified the ministry’s figure.

The enclave’s latest death toll is an updated breakdown of how many children, women, men and the elderly have been killed, according to UN spokesperson Farhan Haq.

The death toll in the Gaza Strip, cited regularly by the UN is still more than 35,000 but now reflects a breakdown of 24,686 bodies “who have been fully identified”.

Medics working in extremely difficult conditions in the blockaded Gaza Strip, where the health sector is on the brink of collapse, say the bodies of the dead that arrive at hospitals are, on many occasions, unrecognizable.

First-hand accounts of a group of Western medics who arrived in southern Gaza before the Israeli offensive on Rafah began, add further weight to this argument.

Mohammed Tahir, an orthopedic and peripheral nerve surgeon, who is among the group, operating at the European Hospital near Rafah said, “People literally, their limbs and their bodies torn to shreds. Children with mutilated faces.”

According to Haq, the new data released by the Gaza health ministry – 7,797 children, 4,959 women, 1,924 elderly, and 10,006 men – are the dead bodies who have been identified, assumingly by family members, a relative or a friend.

“There’s about another 10,000 plus bodies who still have to be fully identified, and so then the details of those – which of those are children, which of those are women – that will be re-established once the full identification process is complete,” Haq stated.

Palestinian health officials say with entire families being wiped out at such a rapid pace, the identification process has been revised, which means many women and children are yet to be fully identified.

And yet, it is estimated another 10,000 plus bodies, that have been registered as missing, are dead under the rubble of collapsed residential buildings.

Israeli leaders have said between 10,000 to 16,000 Hamas fighters have been killed, depending on which Israeli politician or diplomat is speaking.

Analysts say it is extremely unrealistic that the 10,006 men identified as dead by the Gaza Health Ministry are all Hamas fighters. Even a ballpark figure would logically indicate that many innocent men have been killed as they are the most likely to venture outdoors in search of security or food in the totally blockaded “concentration camp”.

During a U.S. congressional hearing on February 29, when U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was asked how many Palestinian women and children had been killed by the Israeli military he replied: “It is over 25,000.”

Since that intelligence assessment by the United States, the Israeli military has been bombing Gaza non-stop on a daily basis, which would raise the number of women and children killed by America’s own estimate.

UN coordination with the Palestinian ministry of health on casualty figures in previous bombardments on Gaza that have resulted in large mass casualty figures have proven the enclave’s figures “to be generally accurate,” Haq added.

Human Rights Watch also says, “We have been monitoring human rights abuses in the Gaza Strip for three decades, including several rounds of hostilities. We’ve generally found the data that comes out of the ministry of health to be reliable”.