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.