Calculating Gaza’s death toll

Palestinian health authorities say Israel’s ground and air campaign in Gaza has killed more than 39,000 people, mostly civilians, and driven most of the enclave’s 2.3 million people from their homes.

The official Ministry of Health announced today that 39,175 Palestinians had been killed in Israel’s offensive.

How is the death toll counted?

In the first months of the war, death tolls were calculated entirely from counting bodies that arrived in hospitals and data included names and identity numbers for most of those killed.

As the conflict ground on, and fewer hospitals and morgues were able to operate, the authorities adopted other methods too.

From early May, the Health Ministry updated its breakdown of total fatalities to include unidentified bodies which account for nearly a third of the overall toll. Omar Hussein Ali, head of the ministry’s emergency operations centre in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, said these were bodies that had arrived at hospitals or medical centres without personal data such as identity numbers or full names.

It also began including deaths reported online by family members who had to input information including identity numbers.

Is the death toll comprehensive?

The numbers do not necessarily reflect all victims as many are still missing under the rubble, the Palestinian Health Ministry says. In May it estimated that some 10,000 bodies were uncounted in this way.

The Lancet medical journal published a letter from three academics on 5 July estimating that indirect deaths, caused by factors like disease, might mean the death toll is several times higher than official estimates and possibly above 186,000.

The authors said the figure was based on what they said was the conservative estimate of four indirect deaths to one direct death based on trends from prior conflicts.

The UN human rights office and the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health have also said that the true figures are likely higher than those published, without giving specifics.

How credible is the death toll?

Pre-war Gaza had robust population statistics and better health information systems than in most Middle East countries, public health experts told Reuters.

A study this week by London-based Airwars – a non-profit compiling detailed lists of casualties from open source material – found a correlation of at least 75 per cent between its lists and those of Gazan authorities for thousands of people killed in the early weeks of the war.

The watchdog’s Director, Emily Tripp, said there had since been a degradation of the accuracy but that the “core gathering of names was still strong.”

The United Nations regularly cites the ministry’s death toll figures, while naming the ministry as the source, and the World Health Organisation has voiced full confidence in them.

Early in the conflict, after US President Joe Biden cast doubt on casualty figures, the Ministry of Health published a detailed list of the 7,028 deaths that had been registered by that point. On 24 July it released a new list of the names of the 28,185 identified victims up to the end June.

The Palestinian Health Ministry has estimated for most of the conflict that around 70 per cent of the dead are women and children.

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