More than 75,000 people were killed in the first 16 months of the two-year war in Gaza, at least 25,000 more than the death toll announced by local authorities at the time, a study published on Wednesday in the Lancet Global Health medical journal showed.
The research also found that reporting by the Gaza health ministry about the proportion of women, children and elderly people among those killed was accurate.
A total of 42,200 women, children and elderly people died between Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas launched a surprise attack into Israel that prompted a devastating Israeli offensive into Gaza, and Jan. 5 last year, the study found.
Photo: Reuters
The deaths comprised 56 percent of violent deaths in Gaza.
“The combined evidence suggests that, as of Jan 5., 2025, 3 to 4 percent of the population of the Gaza Strip had been killed violently and there have been a substantial number of nonviolent deaths caused indirectly by the conflict,” the authors of the study, a team including an economist, demographer, epidemiologist and survey specialists.
The exact death toll in Gaza has been bitterly disputed, although last month a senior Israeli security officer told Israeli journalists that figures compiled by health authorities in Gaza were broadly accurate, marking a U-turn after years of official attacks on the data.
The officer was quoted as saying that about 70,000 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli attacks on the territory since October 2023, excluding those missing.
Gaza health authorities say the direct toll from Israeli attacks has exceeded 71,660 people, including more than 570 killed since a ceasefire came into effect in October last year.
Researchers who published a study in the Lancet Global Health last year estimated the death toll in Gaza during the first nine months of the war given by the Palestinian territory’s health ministry was about 40 percent lower than their estimate.
The new research also suggests that official death toll was a substantial undercount, and by a roughly similar margin.
It was based on a survey of 2,000 families in Gaza, carefully selected to be representative of the territory’s population, who were asked to give details of deaths among their members. The survey was run by experienced Palestinian pollsters known for their work in Palestine and elsewhere in the region.
“This is a very sensitive survey, and potentially very upsetting [for respondents], so it was important to have Palestinians both asking and answering the questions,” said Michael Spagat, a professor of economics at Royal Holloway, University of London, one of the authors of the peer-reviewed study.
Spagat, who has worked on the calculation of casualties of conflicts for more than 20 years, said the new research suggested 8,200 deaths in Gaza from October 2023 to January last year were attributable to indirect effects, such as malnutrition or untreated disease.
He questioned another study published in the journal in 2024 that estimated there would be four “indirect” deaths for every “direct” death.
“There is a huge variation depending on the specific circumstances of every conflict. In [the] Kosovo [conflict of 1998-1999] almost all the deaths were violent. In somewhere like Darfur, you see something very different. In Gaza, at least initially, there were resources in terms of well-trained doctors and a health system... Also, the territory is very small, so when aid does flow you can reach people,” Spagat said.
“I would push back on the notion that this is a small number of deaths. I think we’re experiencing desensitization effects ... but, yes, it’s much lower than what many people say and believe,” he added.
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