Counting the dead in Israel's genocide in Gaza
The Gaza ceasefire will expose the horrific cost of Israel's genocide as efforts turn to finding those under the rubble and counting the war's true death toll
A tentative ceasefire has come into force following the agreement between Israel and Hamas in early October on the first phase of a US-brokered plan aimed at ending the two-year war in Gaza, which the United Nations has described as genocide.
As of Sunday, the Palestinian Ministry of Health has recorded over 68,000 people killed, the majority of them women, children, and the elderly, with around 170,200 wounded since the war began in October 2023.
At least 20,000 children are among the dead, making up over 30% of the death toll. Overall, more than ten percent of the pre-war population of the Gaza Strip has been killed or injured.
Violence at aid distribution points run by the US and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) has also resulted in a large number of fatalities. Since late May, over 2,500 Palestinians have reportedly been killed while trying to obtain food.
Since the start of the truce, Israel has handed over the bodies of 135 Palestinians, the health ministry in the besieged strip said. These bodies reportedly show clear signs of torture, mutilation, and field execution, including tied hands and blindfolded eyes.
An independent UN commission of inquiry concluded in a report on 16 September that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
Gaza officials have demanded an immediate investigation by an independent international body into war crimes and genocide during Israel’s war.
The true death toll in the coastal enclave remains unknown and is likely far higher than official figures indicate. Gaza's Ministry of Health (MoH) only counts people brought to hospitals or officially recorded dead in morgues.
Thousands more are believed to have died from untreated injuries, while many others have suffered fatal consequences from Israel’s starvation policy and enforced blockade, which has created deadly shortages of food, medicine, clean water and fuel, causing a man-made famine across the strip.
Since the beginning of the war, at least 463 Palestinians have died from malnutrition, including 157 children, according to Gaza’s MoH. The real number is thought to be much higher since the collapse of healthcare services has left many deaths unrecorded.
Absent from the death toll are also the thousands buried under the rubble of destroyed buildings, with an estimated 10,000 people still missing, as well as the war’s indirect victims from siege conditions and hunger.
Gaza’s civil defence said more than 280 bodies have been recovered since the withdrawal of Israeli forces.
Since Israeli troops pulled back from parts of the Palestinian territory, many Gazans have returned to find their homes in ruins, still searching for the bodies of loved ones as they grapple with the staggering destruction.
The first phase of the truce deal offers a window to assess the true scale of Gaza’s devastation, even though Israeli attacks have continued after the ceasefire announcement.
Ongoing fighting not only hinders efforts to document casualties but also puts rescue teams and field researchers in grave danger. Medical teams had anticipated that they would use the ceasefire period to begin excavating and retrieving bodies trapped under collapsed buildings.
“It’s become extremely hard to continue documentation work in Gaza as before,” Ashraf Hamdan, a Palestinian spatial researcher, told The New Arab.
The UN and many independent experts mainly rely on the war casualty figures provided by Gaza’s health ministry, the only organisation on the ground keeping a record of the people killed. The UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR) verifies certain incidents with independent sources, finding a high degree of consistency with past MoH data. Figures from the ministry are also being used in official briefings in Israel.
But the numbers reported by the MoH are likely an undercount of the actual death toll over the course of the war. The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), which counts only fatalities caused by political violence, reported over 67,900 deaths between 7 October 2023 and 3 October 2025.
“Reported fatality numbers might rise if Hamas and other armed groups release the names and counts of their fighters killed during the war,” Nasser Khdour, ACLED’s Middle East assistant research manager, said in an interview with TNA.
A study published by The Lancet in February 2025 found that Israel’s military assault on public health infrastructure throughout the territory seriously impeded the MoH’s ability to collect data from hospitals and other health facilities and record them electronically.
As a result, “the quality of MoH mortality data appeared to deteriorate”, as shown by the rising number of unidentified victims. “Our analysis supports the accuracy of the MoH-reported mortality figures but suggests that these are to be treated as a minimum estimate subject to considerable under-reporting,” the report concluded.
More recent research has found that war-related deaths far surpassed the official figures, estimating 75,200 Palestinians killed in Gaza between 7 October 2023 and 5 January 2025 as a direct result of Israel’s military campaign.
This figure is almost 40 percent higher than the death toll reported by the Gaza Ministry of Health (GMoH) for the same period, which stood at approximately 45,650.
The study draws on findings from a large-scale household survey, the Gaza Mortality Survey (GMS). It found that 56.2 percent of those killed violently were women, children, and the elderly, figures that closely match MoH reports.
In addition, the survey points to some 8,540 indirect deaths caused by starvation, disease, and the near-total collapse of healthcare, bringing the war’s overall death toll to nearly 84,000.
Although no reliable data exist on nonviolent deaths, worsening conditions in Gaza since 2024, marked by the destruction of health, water, and sanitation infrastructure, economic collapse, a lack of basic supplies, and widespread starvation, imply that the indirect death toll will be on the higher end.
One analysis of mortality in Gaza, published in July 2024, indicated that indirect deaths could be at least four times higher than the number of violent deaths.
The challenges of quantifying Israel's genocide
Documenting fatalities and establishing an accurate death toll in the war-devastated territory is fraught with challenges and limitations.
Search and recovery operations are hampered by the lack of heavy machinery needed to clear debris and retrieve victims from the rubble, with ambulance and civil defence crews continuing to face severe obstacles in reaching these areas.
The relevant local authorities and non-governmental organisations responsible for tracking and verifying casualty data are operating under enormous stress with severely stretched resources. Highly unsafe conditions and access restrictions for humanitarian and health workers in Gaza throughout the conflict have made accurate counting impossible.
The Ministry of Health has recorded deaths and injuries under great risk, with several officials killed while performing their work. Researchers working to collect data and keep accurate tallies have themselves struggled just to meet their basic needs.
The destruction of human rights infrastructure, namely the offices of Al Mezan and PCHR, has made operations even harder. Furthermore, unexploded ordnance and the proximity of Israeli troops make fieldwork in many areas nearly impossible.
“This war is unprecedented in its scale and death toll. It demands an effort far beyond the capacity of the Palestinian human rights sector to gather and verify evidence,” Palestinian researcher Ashraf Hamdan said.
He explained that over the two-year conflict, local organisations in Gaza have adapted their documentation processes, developing inventive methods such as contacting people, logging names, and mapping families, especially those with displaced or disappeared relatives.
Hamdan emphasised that these efforts need a “wider framework for documentation” to equip Palestinian groups with the resources and logistical support to sustain their work in this process.
Such a framework, he noted, would help to coordinate tracking the missing, removing rubble, excavating and recovering bodies, and, ultimately, being able to accurately count and verify mortalities.
Alessandra Bajec is a freelance journalist currently based in Tunis
Follow her on Twitter: @AlessandraBajec