Israel suddenly accepts Gaza's official death toll

They smeared it as Hamas propaganda - but the truth is it's much higher

After over two years of aggressive denial, the Israeli army has finally accepted Gaza’s official death toll.

That figure currently stands at around 71,000 Palestinians. Strikingly, the IDF have even accepted that it is an underestimate. According to Israeli newspaper Haaretz, they have noted “that the number does not include missing residents who are potentially buried under rubble.”

Before I go through why the official statistics are almost certainly drastically lower than the real death toll, it is worth remembering how much effort the Israeli state and its propagandists put into discrediting these figures.

Israel’s then Foreign Minister Israel Katz called the figures “fake data from a terrorist organisation”.

An Israeli Foreign Ministry claimed the figures “were manipulated by the Hamas terrorist organisation”, were not accurate”, and denounced media organisations which shared them, declaring: “The parroting of Hamas’ propaganda messages without the use of any verification process has proven time and again to be methodologically flawed and unprofessional.”

Mark Regev, longtime senior advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, urged viewers to be “very careful with the statistics that come out of Gaza” on the grounds that “the numbers about casualties are all provided by Hamas-controlled.”

US President Joe Biden declared: “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed.”

There was an entire industry in the media dedicated to sowing doubt in the official figures.

The BBC and other mainstream news organisations routinely described the figures as emanating from the ‘Hamas-run health ministry’ in order to undermine faith in them.

The right-wing Henry Jackson Society published a report challenging the figures, shared by the likes of the Telegraph.

In The Spectator just three months ago, under the heading ‘The westerners helping Hamas win the propaganda war’, we are told there is a pattern which begins: ‘Step one: The Hamas ‘health ministry’ makes up a casualty number which could be debunked by the most cursory statistical analysis.’

He conjures up the antisemitic blood libel of the Middle Ages, when Jews were falsely accused of killing babies, and the antisemitic ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, then asks: “Why were Hamas’s inflated casualty figures reported as facts?”

This atrocity denial must never be forgiven. It sought to confuse the Western public, to make them uncertain about the true scale of the horror inflicted by Israel’s genocide, with the consequence that they would be less likely to pressure their governments to stop facilitating the slaughter.

As we noted all the way through, after previous onslaughts against Gaza, Israel had accepted the official death toll as accurate - just as they have now done.

But why is Israel suddenly accepting these figures? The truth is obvious. Because they are a huge underestimate - as we also noted throughout the genocide. Ironically, they are now using the official death toll - once smeared as Hamas propaganda - in an attempt to minimise their own guilt.

As noted, the official Gaza death toll excludes those who are classed as ‘missing’ but clearly dead - that is, those buried under rubble whose bodies have never been retrieved.

But as Israel wiped Gaza off the face of the earth, the reporting system to allow accurate counting also came under impossible strain. Many who were killed were simply never reported as such.

And then there are the indirect deaths - which in other mass violence proved to be the biggest share. These deaths are not included in the tally. Gaza’s hospitals were destroyed and over 1,700 medics were killed. Think of people with cancer, diabetes, heart conditions - and other illnesses which could no longer be adequately treated.

Think of the cumulative impact of repeated violent displacements, lack of food, lack of fresh water, lack of proper shelter, and the spreading of illnesses in unhygienic and crammed conditions.

One academic study by researchers at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine suggested that the Ministry of Health in Gaza had underreported violent deaths alone by 41%. Another study arrived at a similar figure.

The Economist - which supported Israel’s genocidal onslaught - offered an estimate of only violent deaths, which was much higher than the official figure. Back then, the Health Ministry reported 52,615 deaths - but the range offered by The Economist was a low of 77,000 and a high of 109,000 deaths. This is out of date data - it stops at 5th May 2025.

Bear in mind that Gaza’s pre-genocide population was between 2.2 and 2.3 million. The proportion killed is much higher than in other 21st-century conflicts - and killed in a much shorter space of time.

This is the crime of the century. It was armed and facilitated by Western politicians and media outlets. If we allow this barbarism to be normalised, then it is not just the Palestinians who have no future. It’s our responsibility to make sure that there is accountability.