KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip (AP) -– Squatting in the rubble, his briefcase perched atop his knees, the human rights researcher interviewed residents of a house shelled by Israel as he compiled a list of Gazans killed and wounded during Israel's offensive against Hamas.

Yasser Abdel Ghafar's work is part of a painstaking endeavor by the Palestinian Center for Human Rights to count the casualties of the 23-day war. The group released a final tally saying 1,284 Gazans were killed and 4,336 wounded, the vast majority civilians.
On Wednesday, fieldworker Abdel Ghafar worked to uncover the circumstances of how one family lost its home and two relatives.
As family members and neighbors sat on plastic chairs in an alley nearby, Abdel Ghafar spoke quietly to 28-year-old Rami Najar, who was in the three-story house in Khan Younis close to Israel's border when it came under fire last week.
His 75-year-old grandfather Khalil Najar and the elderly man's 7-year-old granddaughter, Alla, were killed in the attack, which reduced the house to rubble.
""Were there any armed men near the house?"" Abdel Ghafar asked at one point. No, he didn't see any, said Rami Najar, whose right leg was wounded in the shelling.
Using his briefcase as a writing table, the researcher took down the survivor's story as the two sat on a huge chunk of concrete.
The Palestinian Center for Human Rights has been publishing daily death toll updates with names, ages and whether the victims were civilians or combatants on its Web site since the beginning of the war, and expects to present the final list in several days.
The group said 894 of the dead were civilians, including 280 children and minors 17 and under, as well as 111 women.
The remaining 390 dead were members of Hamas or other groups. They included 167 civil police, many of them killed on the job, and 223 fighters, said Ibtissam Zakout, head of the group's research team. That figure is higher than the 158 dead fighters acknowledged by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other groups.
Hassanain has kept a running list of casualty tolls since the start of the Dec. 27 fighting. He writes his tallies on lose sheets of paper, some stuffed in his coat pockets, and later feeds them into a computer data base.
The doctor, who says he's not affiliated with Hamas or any other Palestinian faction, works out of a tiny room with furniture he said dates back to pre-1967 Egyptian rule of Gaza. Equipped with just a beeper, a fax, a landline, two cell phones and a walkie-talkie, Hassanain dispatches dozens of ambulances and records the medics' first reports of casualties. In between, he accompanies ambulances taking the most seriously wounded to Israel and Egypt.
The ministry, like most Gaza government agencies, is run by Hamas. Israeli warplanes targeted many Hamas ministries during the war, and the Health Ministry moved part of its operations to Gaza's main Shifa Hospital after the start of the offensive.