How many people have been killed by Israel in Gaza since 7 October 2023?
It’s an almost impossible question to answer but, as the likes of the New York Times publish atrocity-minimizing op-eds that argue Israel hasn’t killed all that many people really – certainly not as many people as it could kill if it wanted to with all the big-boy bombs US taxpayers have helped fund – it’s an increasingly important issue to grapple with. “The first question the anti-Israel genocide chorus needs to answer is: Why isn’t the death count higher?” Bret Stephens asked in his recent New York Times op-ed. Here’s the thing, Bret. It almost certainly is.
Let’s start with the official figure from Gaza’s ministry of health, the one all media outlets cite, which is around 60,000 direct deaths – 18,500 of whom are children. These numbers, according to the Economist, are derived from two lists. One is based on information from hospitals. The other is based on an online survey in which people report their relatives’ deaths. While there are numerous pro-Israel voices keen to discredit the death toll, the Economist notes that “[i]ndependent investigators have confirmed that those on the ministry’s two lists have almost certainly died”. Humanitarian agencies have also said that, historically, statistics from the ministry of health are reliable.
While Stephens may not think 60,000 dead Palestinians is much to worry about, it’s a huge number: the equivalent of a 9/11 happening every day for 20 days. But, due to limitations in capturing data, that number is also almost certainly a massive underestimate. It is far more likely that the real death toll is in the hundreds of thousands. And by “real death toll” I mean direct deaths from military campaigns and indirect deaths due to the famine created by Israel’s siege on Gaza, as well as deaths from preventable illnesses or medical conditions that couldn’t be treated due to Israel’s blockade on medical supplies and destruction of hospitals. It also means bodies that are rotting under the rubble and may never be formally identified. In January of this year, it was estimated there were at least 10,000 bodies buried under the wreckage of Gaza.
Trying to figure out the real death toll is difficult – by design. Infrastructure in Gaza has been almost completely obliterated: the UN estimates up to 92% of all residential buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed since the start of the conflict. Many of the hospitals, which played a key part in counting the dead, have been destroyed or are barely functioning. Israeli strikes have repeatedly caused internet and phone blackouts. Gaza, more generally, has become what Israel’s leaders and influencers promised to make it from the very beginning: a place where no human being can live.
Meanwhile, Israel has refused to allow foreign reporters free access into Gaza (although it takes some on heavily curated propaganda trips), systematically murdered Palestinian journalists on the ground and hampered efforts for independent third-party investigations into mass graves and suspected war crimes. These are not exactly the actions of a party that has nothing to hide.
Despite the difficulty of counting fatalities, there have been several attempts to calculate a more accurate death toll. In July 2024, for example, the Lancet medical journal published a letter from respected scientists which tried to calculate indirect deaths, noting that in “recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths”. The authors suggested that by this measure, “it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza”. Writing in the Guardian in September 2024, Prof Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, noted that the Lancet estimates were “very conservative” and extrapolated the methodology to estimate about 335,500 deaths in total by the end of 2024. We are now, of course, inching towards the end of 2025.
Then, in January 2025, research published in the Lancet estimated that the death toll in the first nine months of war was about 40% higher than numbers recorded by the Palestinian territory’s health ministry. The peer-reviewed statistical analysis was conducted by academics at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Yale University and other institutions. This used death toll data from the health ministry, and social media obituaries to estimate that there were between 55,298 and 78,525 deaths from traumatic injuries in Gaza up to 30 June 2024. Again: that’s just direct deaths from traumatic injuries and those numbers are from more than a year ago now.
In June 2025, a new study led by Michael Spagat, a researcher of war and armed conflict at the University of London, estimated that more than 80,000 Palestinians had been killed in Israel’s military campaign in Gaza between 7 October 2023 and 5 January 2025. This study, which has not been peer-reviewed yet, was conducted independent of Gaza’s ministry of health records and is the first actual empirical study: researchers on the ground surveyed a sample of 2,000 households, representative of Gaza’s population before 7 October 2023. Of those deaths, 75,200 were classified as violent deaths and 8,540 were “indirect” deaths.
All of which to say: we have absolutely no idea how many people have been killed in Gaza. And, now that Gaza has slid into man-made famine, documenting the dead will only become harder. Throughout 2025, Iraq Body Count (IBC) has been publishing, with permission, English versions of the victim names lists irregularly produced by the information unit within Gaza’s ministry of health. Spokespeople from IBC have said the team of 15 people at the ministry of health, who have been documenting the dead in Gaza, are now starving and at serious risk of becoming unable to continue their work.
While numbers don’t matter for the purpose of proving a genocide, I would bet my own life that the number is much higher than the 60,000 figure media outlets report. Go look at the rare pictures that have come out of Gaza, which is a wasteland, and tell me you don’t agree. At this stage it feels like journalistic malpractice to talk about 60,000 people being dead, without explaining that the number is likely far higher.
I would love to be proved wrong on all this. I would love to find out that Israel has “only” killed 60,000 people. I would love to find out that all the children who are being shot in the head just carelessly walked into bullets and weren’t being deliberately targeted. I would be ecstatic to discover that the IVF center in Gaza that was destroyed by Israel wasn’t targeted, as a UN report says, as part of an effort to destroy “in part the reproductive capacity of Palestinians in Gaza as a group”.
And it would be very easy for Israel’s government, which keeps screaming “blood libel” as accusations of genocide mount, to correct the record if it wanted to. It could let foreign journalists have unfettered access to Gaza. It could allow independent agencies to conduct investigations. But it will not do any of these things. So, to echo Bret Stephens, the first question the pro-Israel “there’s no genocide chorus” needs to answer is: Why won’t Israel let independent parties verify the death count? I think we all know the answer to that.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian US columnist
• This article was amended on 8 August 2025. An earlier version misspelled Bret Stephens’ name as Brett Stephens.
