We have corrected an issue with our West Bank Daily dataset involving the cumulative count of settler attacks that we build using OCHA's weekly updates. The correction relates to our reporting of this number, not the underlying data we collect from OCHA.

On December 16, 2024, we incorporated OCHA's count of settler attacks in our total number, bringing the cumulative count of settler attacks since October 7, 2023 to 1,768. On the following day, December 17th, we kept the cumulative count set to the prior value of 1,736. This continued until recently which has led to an undercount of 32 settler attacks. We've fixed this continuity issue by updating all report values from and including December 17th, 2024 to build on each other. Each report date since then will have been increased by 32.

We've updated our process to ensure this doesn't occur again.

We previously noted in February that we started including the breakdowns the Gaza Ministry of Health started reporting for the total killed for a given report date. These fields were added to our documentation for the Gaza Daily Casualities dataset but weren't surfaced properly in our JSON or CSV dataset formats. This has been fixed and you should see these optional fields present in reports going back to January of this year.

On March 23rd, 2025 Gaza officials released a 1516 page PDF representing the list of those killed in Gaza up to March 23rd, 2025.

The list format was very similar to recent updates we received earlier versions. You can download an Excel file provided by Iraq Body Count (processing the above pdf) here that was used as the source for this update. This sheet was sourced by IBC from the Gaza Ministry of Health and formatted to include english names. You can view the updated dataset on our Killed in Gaza page.

Methodology​

We slightly change the update method we last reported and instead of using our own arabic to english name mapping we used Iraq Body Count excel list in order to expedite the process. The current process still used following adjustments to the source report:

• renaming header to comply with our previous naming
• adding source u i.e. unknown since no source was provided by Ministry of Health

Change Summary​

The following tables summarize the updated demographics of the Killed in Gaza list following this update:

Of the children in this list (31.2% of the total), the following is the breakdown by age group:

The Gaza Ministry of Health has been reporting new breakdowns during the ongoing ceasefire for the numbers of individuals killed. We've added the following optional fields to the daily report objects to make this detail available:

All of these field values are included in the existing killed and ext_killed fields and will be reported for as long as the breakdowns are made available.

We're providing detail on why the Gaza casualties update for January 11th listed a total of 531 killed for that 48 hour period.

The Gaza Ministry of Health noted in their January 11th update that they've added 499 to the number of those killed in that 48 hour period (on top of 32 for that specific time period) due to the decision of a judicial body which ruled on the deaths of a number of people reported missing to date.

As expected in a conflict where the mass destruction of residential and civilian buildings is widespread, many individuals who are reported missing must be presumed dead when their bodies cannot be recovered. "Judicial bodies" are tasked with investigating these disappearances, including verifying the last known locations and events leading up to them. This process highlights the meticulous efforts made by Gaza’s officials to ensure their reports are accurate and resistant to outside scrutiny. However, the result of these thorough procedures is that these deaths are often viewed as underreported due to the rigid framework they follow. For example, a recent report published in The Lancet revealed that the number of Gazans dying from traumatic injuries could be undercounted by as much as 41%. We’ve also provided a detailed analysis of other estimates suggesting underweighting of other factors that lead to higher casualties.

Our work over the past year started with aggregating the statistical reports coming out of Gaza's Ministry of Health & Government Media Office to help make their work more accessible.

It's becoming clear that the numbers we've continued to report verbatim from official sources are a small slice of the overall picture of human suffering over the past year. It's important to highlight that the official numbers we publish here, and that nearly every media outlet and government have trusted, are restricted to:

• only those deaths that can be identified, and
• only those deaths that can be linked back to an act of Israeli aggression

Any Gazans known to have been killed and who didn't make it to health authorities, or who are long missing and presumed dead, are generally not included in the ministry reporting. Even those names submitted by the public must follow a rigorous confirmation process through a committee to confirm the circumstances of their death (we expand on this in our dataset source documentation).

The tireless work of Gaza's authorities is admirable and extremely important, but it's a very focused view of the impacts of Israel's actions. For a more realistic picture one must use these official numbers as one of many inputs alongside other important factors like:

• malnutrition
• infectious diseases
• maternal & neonatal health problems
• untreated or unsupported pre-existing conditions
• unrecovered or buried bodies (more than 60% of Gaza's buildings are damaged or destroyed)

The toll of these combined factors are believed to far exceed the official numbers & names we've been reporting. Consider the following estimates provided by researchers:

The following was mentioned in the appendix to an October 2, 2024 letter to the US administration from medical professionals citing BMC Medicine research:

Deaths from military violence are usually the smaller share, and indeed civilian excess mortality in wars can be 25 times higher than deaths from violence.

By this measure, if you take Israel's own estimate that "at least 17,000" of the reported deaths were Hamas fighters, that implies almost half a million in excess civilian mortality.

From The Lancet, a medical and public health journal:

“it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.”

From the above-noted appendix (page 6) based on IPC reports of severe food insecurity:

In total it is likely that 62,413 people have died of starvation and its compilations in Gaza from October 7, 2023 to September 30, 2024. Most of these will have been young children.

It's important to note that the vast majority of these estimated deaths would not be included in the daily casualties reports or periodical names list we've published here.

We will continue to aggregate and publish the reports from authorities in Gaza as we have, though we will be making more of an effort to put those numbers in context and with clearer caveats. We encourage all of those who rely on what we publish to take the same level of care.

We recommend reading Estimating the Death Toll of the War on Gaza for more on this topic.

Around September 15th, Gaza officials released a 649 page PDF on their WhatsApp channel representing the list of those killed in Gaza up to August 31st.

The list format was very similar to recent updates we received on the Ministry of Health's telegram channel. You can download the PDF here that was used as the source for this update. You can view the updated dataset on our Killed in Gaza page.

We noted the following changes to their reporting format from the last update:

• they've added a new source value to each record labeled either "judicial committee" or "house committee" which accounted for less than 5% of the records - the vast majority are still attributed to the Ministry of Health

Methodology​

We maintained the update method we last reported and continue to perform the following adjustments to the source report:

• normalizing the date of birth date format to YYYY-MM-DD
• converting the source field from arabic to an english abbreviation
• converting the sex/gender field from arabic to an english abbreviation
• adding the english name translation using our existing lookup tables

Change Summary​

The following tables summarize the updated demographics of the Killed in Gaza list following this update:

Of the children in this list (33% of the total), the following is the breakdown by age group:

On July 24, we received an updated list of names of those killed in Gaza up to June 30th. We've incorporated this list in its entirety, replacing our prior list.

The new list was in a PDF format like the recent updates. You can download the Ministry of Health PDF here that was used as the source for this update.

We noted the following changes to their reporting format from the last update:

• they added back the "source" column we previously used to track public submissions vs. official sourcing, so we've accepted these values which may overwrite values previously reported as "unknown" for this column in our prior list
• they added back the date of birth field and kept the age

Changes to Update Methodology​

In the past we accepted a subset of records in order to avoid having to verify each update, by not accepting record changes which were drastically different (by some arbitrary change threshold, like for the arabic name for example). This kind of reconciliation has diminishing benefits now that the ministry's reporting format has mostly standardized. We also want to defer to the official source of truth, rather than introduce our own decisions to their processes. For that reason you may notice the following main differences in output:

• where we generated IDs for records where that field was missing, the field will now be empty - we did not consider this a breaking change given the vast majority of records have IDs
• most records saw small age changes reflecting our wholesale acceptance of their record values - in the past we adjusted these based on the availability of data in prior reports and validation issues we saw when comparing date of births, but the reference date we used may have accounted for a discrepancy as well

Otherwise the main changes we make to their reporting include:

• normalizing the date of birth date format to YYYY-MM-DD
• converting the source field from arabic to an english abbreviation
• adding the english name translation using our existing lookup tables

Change Summary​

We've issued this update on two different dates, a partial list update in August and one in early September.

The following tables summarize the updated demographics of the Killed in Gaza list following the latest update on September 7th, 2024:

The Gaza Ministry of Health has started reporting some days for 48 hour periods on a consistent basis, with the last two dates being August 17th (with no report on August 16th) and August 12th (with no report on August 11th).

In the event of a skipped reporting date like the scenarios noted above, you'll see a new report_period field indicating 48 hours for the consolidated report and 0 hours for the skipped report. For example: August 17th would have 48 hours and August 16th would have 0 hours. We're maintaining the skipped report dates for consistency and to reflect the cumulative values on those dates regardless of a report presence.

All existing report dates covering 24 hour periods will have a value of 24 for report_period.

On May 5th, we received an updated list of names of those killed in Gaza up to April 30th. We've incorporated new records and existing record changes from that update.

The new list was in a PDF format that differed slightly from the prior lists that were distributed in CSV & PDF format. You can download the Ministry of Health PDF here that was used as the source for this update.

We noted the following changes to their reporting format:

• they dropped the "source" column we previously used to track public submissions vs. official sourcing, so we added a new "unknown" value to our existing source field if a new record has no source attribute (but we've kept the old value if the record already existed)
• they removed the date of birth field and only reported age
• a number of records did not have an identifier, so we generated one based on the report date and their reported index (prefixed with missing-)

Change Summary​

The following tables summarize the demographic changes in our Killed in Gaza list following its merge with the abovenoted Ministry list:

Demographics of Our List Before Merge​

Demographics of Newly Added Records​

Demographics of Our Updated List After Merge​

Demographics of Removed Records​

184 records in our prior list were not present in the latest list release (by identification number) so we removed them.

We believe the higher ratio of Men in this revised list reflects the addition of community-reported sourcing. These records likely include more of those lost or missing for which remains were not received by health authorities as was the case for most of the records in the initial list distributed in January.

Merge Methodology / Commentary​

Our methodology for updating existing records and accepting new ones didn't change and we detailed our approach in our prior April 13th update.

Where there were changes in names for existing records by identification ID within our accepted threshold of 30%, the breakdown was as follows:

(the change threshold upper bound means that 20% would include a 12% or 18% change to the original name)

In terms of overall types of record changes across those already in our list at the time of merge, the breakdown was as follows: