Gaza - The health ministry in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip announced on Monday that the death toll from Israel's ongoing bombardment of the Palestinian enclave had exceeded 10,000 people.

Israel launched a devastating aerial campaign, followed by a siege and later a ground invasion in reprisal for the Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7, the deadliest in the country's history.

More than 1,400 people were killed in the surprise Israel attack, mostly civilians, according to Israeli authorities.

Israel's leaders have said they are determined to eradicate the extremist movement that has controlled Gaza since 2007, retaliating with relentless air and artillery strikes.

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The 10,022 deaths in the Gaza Strip since then were announced in a press conference by a health ministry spokesperson, Ashraf al-Qudra, on Monday, the 31st day of the war. He said that at least 292 Palestinians were killed overnight in intense Israeli bombing and accused them of "perpetrating 19 massacres in the last few hours."

The health ministry said the majority of the deaths since the start of the war have been civilians, including 4,000 children. The dead are also said to include more than 2,600 women whilst more than 25,000 people have been injured, according to the ministry.

Gaza's health authorities have consistently produced reliable data trusted by the UN and other international agencies.

The validity of the numbers published by the ministry had been called into question by US President Joe Biden, who has been steadfast in supporting Israel and opposing a ceasefire.

However, Pentagon spokesman Brigadier General Pat Ryder told journalists on Monday that civilian casualty "numbers are in the thousands."

In an effort to prove the credibility of their figures, on October 26 the Gaza health ministry published a list of nearly 7,000 names, all people whom it said had been killed in the war up to that point. The list included the sex, age, and identity number of each person killed. The ministry, which falls under Gaza's Hamas government, said it published the record to "reveal to the whole world the details and the names so that they might know the truth."

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It explained in an accompanying document that in governmental hospitals, which fall under Hamas's governance, the personal information and ID number of each killed Palestinian is entered into a computerized database after the body arrives or after they succumb to their wounds. This data is then transmitted daily to the "central register of martyrs" at the health ministry.

If the dead are taken to a private hospital, their personal information is recorded on a special form which is sent "within 24 hours" to the health ministry, which then adds the details to its central database.

The ministry said that a dedicated information center verifies the data provided by both types of hospitals before it is entered into the database to ensure it "does not contain duplicates or errors."