Behind the Numbers The Truth About Gaza's Death List
Gaza's fatalities list is an explosive and controversial document. Critics claim the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry duplicates names, counts Hamas militants as civilians and inflates the number of women and minors. Haaretz took a deep dive into how the list of nearly 70,000 names was compiled to test those claims
The name Hind Rajab, possibly the most famous Palestinian victim of the war, appears on row 5,918 of the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry's list of fatalities. In January 2024, she was the sole survivor among seven people in her family's car as they tried to flee Gaza City at the orders of the IDF. For over two hours, she remained on the phone with her family and the Red Crescent, which dispatched paramedics to rescue her.
Eleven days later, her body, riddled with hundreds of bullets, was found in the car. The bodies of the paramedics, Yousef al-Zeino and Ahmed al-Madhoun, were discovered in the bullet-riddled ambulance nearby. Their deaths are recorded later in the table, in rows 46,722 and 49,661.
Hind Rajab was 5 years and 8 months old when she died. Her position in row 5,918 means that 5,917 children younger than her were killed in the war. The first name in the table is Waad Sabbah, who was killed six weeks after Hind. He and 17 other newborns died within their first 24 hours. One hundred and fifteen children died before reaching one month. A total of 1,054 children died before their first birthday.
The Gaza Health Ministry's list of the dead, which Haaretz translated from Arabic with the help of AI and which spans more than 2,000 pages, is a document whose significance is rivaled only by the controversy it has generated. Governments worldwide, along with researchers and human rights organizations, have treated it as the closest thing to an official estimate of the death toll. Israel and conservative researchers, on the other hand, have raised doubts. They have criticized the list, attempted to undermine its credibility and pointed to errors, though these appear negligible.
Over time, however, a consensus has taken shape: even if the list has weaknesses, including the fact that it does not differentiate between combatants and civilians, it reflects the scale of the disaster inflicted on Gaza and its people. It also forms the basis for allegations that Israel committed war crimes, crimes against humanity and even genocide.
"It's clear that the list isn't 100 percent accurate and that it has errors, but I think they're around one percent," says Dr. Lee Mordechai, a historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who leads a war documentation project based on tens of thousands of open sources.
He also points to the test of time. In previous rounds of fighting, when Israel eventually published its own figures for civilian deaths, they were close to those of the Gaza Health Ministry. "The Health Ministry's count is actually an undercount. It does not include unidentified bodies, bodies buried in the rubble or bodies for which there is no information."
As the months have passed, claims of fabrication and exaggeration have largely remained confined to Israeli television panels. At the end of January, an apparent dispute over the number of dead seemed to end in Israel when a senior army source confirmed that the IDF recognizes that 70,000 people died, precisely the figure cited by Gazan authorities. Even so, politicians have been slow to echo that acknowledgment, and the IDF's English-language spokesperson quickly issued a denial of the senior officer's remarks.
Even if the argument over the total number of dead is, for now, largely settled, disagreement in Israel continues over who the dead were: How many were gunmen, how many were affiliated with Hamas, how many were killed under circumstances that meet the conditions of international law?
None of this alters the stark figures in the table. Of the recorded deaths, 20,876, about 30 percent, are young girls, teenage girls and women. Another 3,220 were aged 65 and over, including the final name on the list, Tamam al-Batsh, who was 110 when she died.
68,844
Gazans whose names appear on the list
Each dot represents 100 people on the Gaza Health Ministry's list. The list includes people who died violent deaths in the war – and were identified. About 3,000 additional bodies remain unidentified, and many others are still buried under the rubble. Deaths from hunger or disease are not included.
65% of the dead were ages 18-65; about 30% were minors and 5% were 65 or older.
17,594 were age 16 and under, including 3,150 infants and toddlers (3 and under). 18 were killed within their first 24 hours of life. Among older teenagers (ages 16-18), 3,039 were killed.
Of the older teenagers, 837 were girls and 2,202 were boys, who were more likely to leave shelter. There is no conclusive evidence that teenagers participated in fighting in large numbers.
This age group includes the vast majority of Hamas militants, though they are not identified as such on the list. According to most experts, most of the men killed were not armed militants and, like teenage boys, were more likely to leave shelters. Although 33,793 men were killed – nearly three times the number of women (11,197) – women make up a higher share of the dead than in any other war in recent decades.
32,849 of those killed were age 16 and under, women (including teenage girls), or age 65 and older; in other words, individuals not likely to have participated in combat.
Those not suspected of being combatants – about half of the dead – make up a much higher share than in any other war in the 21st century.
In fact, the number of dead reported by the Gaza Health Ministry has already surpassed 70,000. It now stands at 72,073 names. Thousands have been added since the cease-fire. Some 715 are bodies recovered from the rubble; most of the others were identified by families or confirmed by the ministry after investigation. The ministry has also recently listed another 3,490 people as missing, most of whom are presumed dead.
The most recent list obtained by Haaretz is updated through the end of October 2025. It is an Excel file containing 68,844 rows. Each row includes a first name, surname, father's name and grandfather's name, sex, date of birth and ID number.
According to the Gaza Health Ministry, the list includes only those who died from trauma, meaning combat-related violent deaths – gunfire, bombings, shrapnel wounds and building collapses. Those who died from hunger, disease, accidents or the collapse of the health system, what researchers call surplus or indirect mortality, are not included. Nor are natural deaths unrelated to the war.
"We're committed to recording only violent cases of death," Gaza Health Ministry statistics director Zaher al-Wahidi told Haaretz.
Israel's official stance toward the list has remained unchanged since the start of the war: it is propaganda. Six months ago, the Foreign Ministry described the figures as "misleading and unreliable." Former Ambassador to the U.N. Gilad Erdan called them "fake." The IDF spokesperson said that "relying on the death toll published by the Hamas terrorist organization is a mistake."
Still, in the past year, it has been increasingly harder to find Israeli officials commenting on the subject. Western media outlets have often quoted senior IDF officers, off the record, as saying the list is credible. What has not changed is this: since the war began, Israel has made no serious effort to demonstrate that the list is false or to present an alternative. It has not proven even once that a person listed as deceased is in fact alive.
In principle, it could easily have done so: Israel issues the ID numbers that appear in the list, and through the Civil Administration it continues to manage the population registry in Gaza. It also has access to biometric records of Gaza's residents (along with facial recognition systems reportedly used during the war). People who consider the list reliable argue that Israel's failure to present counter-evidence, or its failure to make such evidence public if it exists, speaks for itself.
The routes to registration
There are two routes by which a person can be entered into the list.
The first, and more common, accounts for about 80 percent of cases. A person is killed, the body is collected or pulled from the rubble and transported to a hospital. The family arrives, identifies the deceased and provides the name and ID number to the Health Ministry.
"Every 24 hours we add new data," al-Wahidi says. "We verify with hospital administrations that these are indeed cases involving only violent deaths related to the war."
The second route applies to roughly 20 percent of the dead. In these cases, a person is killed and buried by family members without being taken to a hospital. The family then reports the death through an online form. The case is referred to a judicial committee that determines whether the death was violent.
"We do not add names automatically. We established a committee headed by a judge and including representatives from the Health Ministry, the prosecutor's office, the Justice Ministry and the General Investigations Department," al-Wahidi explains. "The committee reviews the evidence and verifies that the reported incident did indeed occur."
He says the committee also checks whether the deceased had a medical condition that could have directly caused the death. Families must provide evidence of a violent death, such as photographs of the body and grave, proof of a strike at the relevant time and place, confirmation from hospitals that there were other victims of the same incident and more. Only after the committee approves the case does the family receive a text message allowing them to obtain a war-related death certificate.
Critics of the list argue that families may have an incentive to report violent deaths in order to qualify for compensation. It was reported this month that the Hamas-run Ministry of Social Development would provide a one-time payment of 500 shekels to war widows, though it is unclear whether this applies only to those whose spouses died of violent causes. Al-Wahidi insists that the legal review process prevents wrongful classification.
"We rejected at least 533 cases reported by families because we determined that the death was natural [and not violent]," he says.
In the case of unidentified bodies, says al-Wahidi, "we document the body, photograph it on both sides, record distinguishing marks, teeth, fractures and surgeries. We also save the clothes and objects and give it a code. After 48 hours, the body is sent for burial." The ministry later attempts to identify the deceased through relatives. If identification is made, the name is added to the list. If not, the person is counted among the dead but not entered into the list. As of now, the gap between the list and the official number of deceased stands at 3,229 people.
Another category not included in the list consists of those buried beneath tens of millions of tons of rubble, some in areas controlled by the IDF and others under collapsed buildings that cannot be cleared because there aren't enough engineering vehicles. That was the fate of 12 members of the Arafat family, buried under their home in Gaza City last July.
The case drew international attention because one of the daughters, 38-year-old Hala Arafat, was filmed alive beneath the rubble, but the IDF did not allow rescuers to reach her before she died. Only after her death was her body retrieved. Unlike her relatives, her name appears in the list, in row 50,622.
An alternative explanation
For much of the war, Gabriel Epstein, an associate at the U.S.-based, nonpartisan Israel Policy Forum, was frequently cited as a critic of Hamas' casualty figures. He now believes that the list is a sound basis for debate on the number of dead. As the war went on, he says, work on the list improved, errors were corrected, and wrong names were removed. He now believes it is largely accurate and may even slightly undercount the dead.
While some bodies likely remain buried under rubble, Epstein believes the number is limited, though not negligible. He bases this assessment on the pace of body recovery, which dropped sharply after the cease-fire was declared, similar to what occurred during the previous cease-fire in January 2025.
Epstein reviewed the list obtained by Haaretz. Out of 68,844 names, he found 24 duplicates and 38 entries with problems in the ID numbers. That means 99.91 percent of the entries were complete, with verified ID numbers. He also found that 64 deaths that had appeared on earlier lists were later removed, while 158 names removed by March of last year were added back. Supporters of the list argue that such deletions and reinsertions indicate that the Health Ministry continues to correct and refine its data.
Al-Wahidi acknowledges that the early versions of the list were flawed. When the IDF occupied Shifa Hospital in November 2023, he says, it destroyed the office and computers storing the data. "We lost the main and alternate data centers. All the systems crashed," he explains. Reconstructing the information from hospital records took time. "There were mistakes then. We had at least 4,000 people with incomplete data. It took us eight months to sort it out and verify that they were real."
For researchers seeking to challenge the findings and identify errors or statistical inconsistencies, those early months provided relatively easy targets. Skeptics claimed that errors in names and ID numbers were intentional. According to them, the purpose was to overrepresent women and children to suggest that most victims were civilians. Their evidence: the proportion of women and children later declined.
Supporters of the list offer a different explanation – changes in the nature of the fighting. In the early weeks, massive bombardments caused indiscriminate deaths and wiped out entire families, including many women and children. Once the ground operation began, the killings became more selective. Men, more frequently suspected of being militants, were killed at higher rates, whether because they were terrorists or because they left home or shelters to obtain food, fuel or other necessities.
One example is Abed al-Karim al-Kahlout. He was shot near a Gaza Humanitarian Foundation aid center and died several days later from internal bleeding that doctors failed to detect due to a lack of imaging equipment. Al-Kahlout appears in row 48,070.
In fact, deletions and corrections continue to this day. Epstein highlights a specific change: in March 2025, the Health Ministry removed 1,896 names from the list, most originating from the online reporting system. In his view, this suggests the family-reporting mechanism is unreliable. Others interpret it differently. For them, the removals demonstrate that the Health Ministry is careful about the reliability of its data. Since then, incidentally, some of the names have been reinstated after further review.
Since October 7, skepticism about Hamas' data has not been limited to Israel. About a year ago, a report by the British conservative think tank the Henry Jackson Society – published mainly in the Israeli press – examined the list. Its researchers, ignoring a more updated list available at the time of publication, identified several errors in age and sex, as well as cases where individuals listed as dead also appeared on the Health Ministry's cancer registry. The examples they cited amounted to less than one percent of the total names.
The report claimed that in some entries men were recorded as women, allegedly to inflate the proportion of female casualties. But a separate review by Action on Armed Violence, a British organization that studies violent conflict and examined more than 12,000 names, found an additional dimension. While 67 men were registered as women, 49 women were registered as men. That pattern suggests clerical mistakes rather than an attempt at deliberate manipulation.
A not-so-simple math
The debate over sex classifications is part of a broader question: who are the people on the list? How many were militants and how many were civilians? How many died violent deaths and how many perhaps did not?
The number of militants on the list is critical, in light of the IDF's rules of engagement, suspicions of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and allegations of genocide. Palestinian spokespeople, researchers and journalists estimate that about 10,000 militants were killed, or fewer. Israeli officials claim at least 20,000.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu repeatedly stated during the war that the ratio of militants to civilians killed in Gaza was 1:1 or 1:1.5. Yet even if the list includes 20,000 militants, the ratio would be roughly 1:2.5. Under the lower estimate, it would be closer to 1:6.
The high share of civilians is reflected in the composition of the list: 46 percent are women or minors, roughly double the proportion seen in other conflicts since the 1990s. In Kosovo or Syria, for example, the figure was about 20 percent. Israeli officials have responded that Hamas recruits teenagers, though no conclusive evidence was presented during the war – certainly not to support claims of thousands of teenage militants killed.
Pinning down Israel's official figures is impossible. Throughout the war, officials cited varying and sometimes contradictory numbers. One month after the fighting began, when Gaza's Health Ministry reported 9,488 dead, a senior Israeli security official was quoted as saying the IDF had killed 20,000 people, half of them terrorists. A month later, in a briefing to foreign media, the IDF said 15,000 people had been killed, including 5,000 Hamas operatives, implying that 5,000 others had effectively come back to life.
The dispute over who qualifies as a Hamas operative mirrors the debate over women and minors. While age and gender appear clearly in the list, there is no column for organizational affiliation, profession or whether a person carried a weapon. Israel, however, applied broader criteria for legitimate targets. For months, anyone receiving a salary from Hamas, including journalists, medics or Finance Ministry employees, was considered a legitimate target.
For Israel, the question was not only what a person did, but also where they were. Commanders in the field repeatedly marked areas on maps described as "kill zones," where anyone entering could be shot, even without visible warnings on the ground. In numerous cases, civilians were killed and later classified as terrorists. In a December 2024 investigation by Haaretz, an officer testified that of 200 people killed by his unit, only ten were identified as Hamas operatives. "But who objected when it was reported that we killed hundreds of terrorists?" he asked.
At times, the issue was not whether a target was legitimate but whether the circumstances were proportionate. For instance, a strike intended to eliminate a wanted individual – or even an object – might also kill dozens of civilians.
On August 25, IDF forces fired at Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis to destroy a camera on the roof believed to belong to Hamas. It later turned out to be a press camera. The strike killed and injured people at the scene. Moaz Abu Taha, a freelance journalist who had worked with multiple outlets, rushed to assist the wounded. A second shell struck, killing him and 19 others. A doctor told Haaretz that the day before, Abu Taha had bought food to distribute to hospitalized children. He was 27. He is listed as entry 35,370.
One of the most sensitive questions about the list concerns not who is included, but who is absent. When Epstein examined known Hamas operatives killed by the IDF, he found that some did not appear on the list, despite clearly dying violent deaths. Three sons of senior Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, for example, were added only a year after their deaths.
Dr. Mordechai suggests this may reflect information-security concerns, as Hamas learned from Hezbollah that publishing casualty lists can aid Israeli intelligence. Critics of the list argue that adding missing militants would dramatically change the overall picture. Yet even if hundreds or a few thousand militants are absent, their inclusion would not significantly change the ratios.
The tragedy behind the numbers
Researchers critical of the list argue that, despite verification procedures, it likely includes some natural deaths, deaths from intra-Palestinian violence or casualties from failed rocket launches by Hamas and other groups. Epstein identified at least six such cases, mostly clashes between Hamas and Israeli-backed militias and one traffic accident.
In September, several Israeli researchers led by Professor Danny Orbach of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem published a study aimed at challenging genocide claims. They argued that, beyond adding thousands of Hamas operatives, thousands of others who died violent deaths not caused by Israel, such as 2,000 killed by failed rocket launches, should be removed from the list. The study acknowledged, however, that these figures were speculative due to the lack of reliable field data.
Another caveat is natural mortality. Gaza's annual natural death toll is estimated at about 5,000 people. Even if all were mistakenly included and then removed, the list would still exceed 60,000 names. By any measure, whether pace of death or share of the population, this remains one of the deadliest conflicts of the 21st century.
Matthew Cockerill, a researcher at the London School of Economics who is critical of Israel, points to the age distribution as further evidence that the list reflects violent deaths. In a dataset containing many natural deaths, he argues, the elderly and toddlers would appear in higher proportions. Their absence as disproportionately large groups suggests the list largely reflects violent fatalities.
Scrutiny of the list's methodology can obscure what it ultimately represents: an immense human tragedy, tens of thousands of lives lost. Some were Hamas operatives killed in combat or in strikes Israel can readily justify. But most of the names belong to civilians killed under a highly permissive Israeli fire policy.
Among them is Asr Abu al-Qumsan, a 3-day-old baby killed when a missile struck his home, listed as entry 34. Directly below him is his twin sister, Eisel. Their mother, Jumana, appears as entry 36,671; their grandmother, Reem, as 59,002. All were killed in the strike on their home in Deir al-Balah in August 2024.
Executive Editors: Roi Hadari and Yarden Zur. Editor: Galia Sivan. Programmer: Asi Oren. Design: Nitzan Salinas. Digital project management: Uri Talshir. Infographics: Nadav Gazit. Translation from Arabic: Hanin Majadli. AI data processing: Amnon Harari. English project producer: Shira Philosof