“Everyone uses the figures from the Gaza Health Ministry because those are generally proven to be reliable,” said Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch. “In the times in which we have done our own verification of numbers for particular strikes, I’m not aware of any time which there’s been some major discrepancy.”
https://archive.ph/m1Mlt#selection-807.0-807.341
What about when the health ministry said 500 died in that hospital blast? Was that not a major discrepancy?