The Iraqi health minister said Thursday that 576 Iraqi insurgents and civilians had died during the sharp upturn in violence since April 1 that has also taken the lives of at least 100 U.S. soldiers.

Health Minister Khudayer Abbas's nationwide compilation of deaths since April 1 was sharply lower than a U.S. military estimate of about 1,000 insurgents killed and about half The Associated Press tally of 1,170 killed based on statements from hospital officials, police and the U.S. military.

Abbas said 271 Iraqis had been killed in Fallujah since the Marine siege began on April 5. Iraqi doctors in the city had given a higher figure of 600 killed, Abbas said, because they had been pressured by insurgents to provide exaggerated claims for political reasons.

The minister said he did not know how many were civilians. An official in the ministry, speaking on condition of anonymity, said 19 percent of the dead were women and children.

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The director of Fallujah General Hospital, Rafie al-Issawi, told AP on April 11 that more than 600 Iraqis had been killed up to that point in the capital, most of them civilians. He said that count was based on records gathered from the main hospital and four clinics in the city.

Also on that date, an AP reporter visited one of two football fields where dead were being buried in Fallujah. Freshly dug graves covered an area about 30 yards wide and 100 yards long, and gravediggers at the site said more than 300 bodies had been interred there.

Abbas told AP on Thursday that the death figures in Fallujah "were exaggerated for political factors. There was some parties and elements who were pressing on the people working in Fallujah hospitals to present exaggerated numbers."

In the first detailed accounting of Iraqi casualties in the fighting that erupted across the country this month, officials at the Iraqi Ministry of Health said yesterday that 264 have been killed and 791 wounded in the Fallujah area since April 5, while in Baghdad another 235 have been killed and 832 wounded.

The health ministry's nationwide data also show that 12 percent of the Iraqis killed were women or children 15 years old or younger.

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Media reports relying on figures compiled by a Fallujah hospital director have said that 600 Iraqis had been killed in the city -- more than twice the number tallied by the health ministry.

Dr. Shakir M. Al-Ainachi, director of the Ministry of Health's new emergency operations center, said he received his figures from the same doctor -- Dr. Rafa' Hayat al Issawi -- who was quoted by several media as saying casualties were as high as 600 dead.

The lower figures were later reported by a public health official who traveled from Ramadi to Fallujah to check documents and inspect graves, including those of people buried in a soccer field, Ainachi said.

"He was under a lot of pressure, political pressure," Ainachi said of Issawi. "You don't know who's standing behind the camera."

Death tolls from this month's fierce fighting across Iraq, especially in Fallujah, are a highly sensitive issue. Iraqis rallied around the people of Fallujah, sending supplies and vowing to fight with insurgents -- to a large degree in response to allegations from religious and political leaders that US Marines were slaughtering civilians in the city wholesale.

There was no way to verify the ministry's figures, and Ainachi acknowledged that his team's counts might not include combat deaths that were are never reported, as well as deaths that family members want to keep secret.

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His statistics don't differentiate between insurgents and civilians. The vast majority of Iraqi casualties were men -- 80 percent of those killed and 90 percent of those wounded nationwide, Ainachi said.

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Ainachi acknowledged that sometimes people are buried before their families get death certificates, particularly in the current chaos. He said the death toll might grow by 10 or 15 percent as families register their dead, as they are required to do to resolve inheritances and family law issues.