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Gaza: What is the actual death toll, and how can we be sure? – DW – 07/03/2025
The health ministry in Gaza has reported at least 55,000 Palestinians killed since October 2023. Israel routinely dismisses these death counts as too high. A new indepedent study says they are actually too low.
Michael Spagat, a researcher of war and armed conflict at the University of London, has led a new study analyzing war-related deaths in Gaza. It estimates that more than 80,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel's military campaign in Gaza between October 7, 2023 and January 5, 2025.
"Ultimately, the most important thing is to memorialize the victims one by one," the expert told DW.
He said the Gazan Ministry of Health is ensuring every casualty is recorded on lists, and added that he considers these records to be "pretty accurate."
Gaza's ministries are administrered by the ruling authority Hamas, which the European Union (EU), US, and others classify as a terrorist organization.
"The Ministry of Health has a list of names with ID numbers, ages, sexes," Spagat told DW. "This can be easily verified."
Such verification has already occurred: In February, scientists published a study in The Lancet journal comparing obituaries published on social media with records kept by Gaza's Ministry of Health, for example. It found that no extra names had been added to the ministry records. It did, however, find that many names were missing. This study therefore concluded that the actual Gaza death toll was likely being under-reported — by as much as 41%.
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Now, for the first time, a study has been conducted that is completely independent of Gaza's Ministry of Health records. The team of scientists, led by Spagat, interviewed people in Gaza about deceased members of their households. To this end, the European scholars collaborated with Palestinian colleagues from the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR), an independent organization headed by political scientist Khalil Shikaki, and funded by private foundations and the European Union, among others. The PSR is based in Ramallah in the Occupied West Bank, but also has experienced staff working on the ground in Gaza.
"We did not go into Gaza, we were already there through our partner organization," Spagat said as he explained the data collection process.
Currently, COGAT, the Israeli Defense Ministry unit tasked with administering civil policy in the West Bank and coordinating logistics between Israel and Gaza, will barely permit anyone to enter the war zone, with the exception of a few aid organizations. Israel has also denied international journalists entry into Gaza since the beginning of Israel's siege and military campaign.
"To my relief none of [the PSR] field workers got killed in the war," Spagat told DW. "All the people who worked on the survey are still alive."
Researchers on the ground surveyed a sample of 2,000 households, representative of Gaza's population pre-October 7, 2023. They were unable to enter areas that had been declared active combat zones and were sealed off by Israel's armed forces. Since virtually Gaza's entire population has been displaced, researchers sought out inhabitants of refugee camps and tent gatherings that have been housing Palestinians from northern Gaza, Rafah, and elsewhere.
The researchers found that between October 7, 2023, and January 5, 2025, some 75,200 Palestinians in Gaza died a violent death as a direct result of the war. This figure is about 40% higher than the one reported by Gaza's Ministry of Health for the same period (45,650 deaths).
The researchers compiled a separate tally of nonviolent war-related deaths, including those who died from starvation or disease due to siege and displacement, and excluding those who were likely to have died of old age or illness regardless of the war. This count raised Gaza's death toll by about another 8,540 so-called "indirect" deaths for the period in question.
This indirect death toll is significantly lower than previously estimated by observers. In July 2024, a study published in The Lancet estimated that for every death recorded, four more indirect deaths would have to be assumed. For months, aid organizations have been warning that tens of thousands of Gazan civilians are at risk of dying from disease and starvation brought on by Israel's blockade.
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Spagat attributed this low indirect death toll to Gaza's young population, which he says was relatively healthy at the beginning of the war, as well as the coastal strip's "pretty good public health system" and "high vaccination rates, thanks to the UN and other aid organizations." He also said this death toll was by no means low compared to other war zones and that "aid organizations have done a good job in keeping people alive during the war who might have well died without this aid."
But, he cautioned, the study was conducted before Israel's total blockade of aid deliveries to Gaza, adding that "a lot of people are alive, but malnourished. If infectious diseases break out, things could change rapidly." He also told DW that "even if there is a ceasefire next week and it sticks, there is still going to be excess, nonviolent death moving forward." As such, "this is not a final number."
Their study has not yet been independently peer-reviewed by scientists who were not involved in the research project. This is another reason why these fatality figures cannot yet be considered final. The findings are, however, consistent with previous independent studies.
Spagat, Shikaki and their teams applied different methods but pursued a similar question: They wanted to independently test the reliability of the numbers reported by Gaza's Health Ministry. What they found, is that the death reports are trustworthy insofar as they are by no means an exaggeration of the actual death toll, but a conservative minimum tally.
"Here, we've got an independent measurement that shows pretty definitively, I believe, that they're not exaggerating the death toll," Spagat said. He added that their study shows Gaza's Ministry of Health provides "a pretty accurate picture of the demographics of the people killed, in particular of the women, children and elderly where our number is very similar to their number."
According to the study, women, children and the elderly acount for well over half of the violent deaths observed during the study period.
Most of the males killed were aged between 15 and 49. But, Spagat explained, this gives no indication as to whether Israel's armed forces were actually targeting combatants, as they claim. As the expert pointed out, young boys and men are killed more frequently in wars. Neither his study nor the Gaza Ministry of Health distinguish between combatants and civilians in their death counts.
The scholar said that field researchers refrained from asking whether Hamas members lived in the households surveyed, as this would could have placed them at risk of being suspected as undercover Israeli agents.
Spagat also said "large numbers of small children" had been killed in the war. While ordinarily hesitant to draw comparisons, he did point out that, strikingly, 4% of the Gaza population has been killed so far, making it "probably the highest percentage of population killed for any war in the 21st century."
If you project the figures from Spagat and Shikaki's study to the present day, you quickly arrive at a death toll of 100,000. It is difficult to imagine such a staggering number of lives lost. Each figure stands for a person with a name and a story.
Many of them we will never know, but some of them, like the al-Najjar family, we do. The children Yahya, Rakan, Ruslan, Jubran, Eve, Rivan, Saydeen, Luqman, and Sidra were killed on May 23, 2025, in an Israeli airstrike on Khan Younis.
Their mother survived because she was on duty as a doctor at a hospital. Only her eleven-year-old son Adam survived the airstrike. The children's father, Hamdi al-Najjar, died a few days later from injuries sustained in the same attack. Unlike most other Gaza victims, their names became known around the world.
