New study: Gaza's death toll is much higher than the world has been told

Far from being exaggerated, a new study underlines how Gaza's official death toll is a severe underestimate

The official death toll in Gaza is wrong - specifically those figures from Gaza’s Ministry of Health. That’s something you’ve heard a lot. Those who have justified one of the worst crimes of our age, Israel’s genocidal rampage, have relentlessly tried to undermine faith in the official death statistics, by claiming they are exaggerated, inflated, invented. This atrocity denial is used to sow doubt and confusion so as to reduce pressure on Western governments to cease their complicity.

But it has long been clear that the official figure - now standing at more than 46,000 - is indeed wrong. It in fact represent a drastic underestimate: that is, the scale of violent deaths caused by Israeli weapons supplied by Western governments is much greater than you are being told.

A new peer reviewed study has been published by The Lancet, the world’s most prestigious medical journal. The academics behind it work at world-leading institutions, like the University of Cambridge, the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and Yale University. Their method was called ‘three-list capture’ - that is, cross referencing the official data with a Ministry of Health online survey and social media obituaries.

And what did they find? 64,260 violent deaths, with a 95% confidence interval. That’s 41% higher than the official statistics. And crucially that was only between 7th October 2023 and 30th June 2024 - so that excludes nearly 200 days worth of death statistics since, and every day the Israeli military slaughters large numbers of Palestinians. Of the deaths with age and sex data available, they found 59% were women, children and the elderly.

It gets even worse. This is still likely a drastic underestimate, not just because it’s out of date. These figures only refer to deaths from traumatic injuries - that is, violent deaths. As the researchers say:

"Our findings underestimate the full impact of the military operation in Gaza, as they do not account for non-trauma-related deaths resulting from health service disruption, food insecurity, and inadequate water and sanitation."

It’s worth just absorbing that point for a moment. Take the destruction of the hospital system alone: as a United Nations report found in October 2024, Israel has “perpetrated a concerted policy to destroy Gaza’s healthcare system as part of a broader assault on Gaza, committing war crimes and the crime against humanity of extermination.” Well over 1,000 health workers have been killed since the genocide began, many others detained, often without charge, their loved ones not notified - kidnapped in common parlance - while all 36 hospitals have been attacked, most of them no longer functional, those remaining only semi operational, deprived of medicines, water, energy, and so on.

The destruction of a territory’s entire healthcare system in isolation - that is, without considering all of the other horrors inflicted on Gaza - imposes a death sentence on countless Palestinians. Think of thousands of cancer patients. Think diabetes, asthma, heart conditions, kidney disease. Think of the 155,000 pregnant women and new mothers, or the 130 babies born each day. Think of how the destruction of a healthcare system interacts with depriving a population of their basic needs - sufficient clean water, nutritious food, shelter with protection from the elements. Think of how it interacts with overcrowding, lack of hygiene, open sewage. Think of how it interacts with the deterioration in physical health driven by the acute stress and collapsing mental wellbeing of apocalyptic circumstances. Consider how these catastrophic circumstances have now prevailed for 66 weeks, with constant decline.

This is why the most accurate measurement of the death toll would be ‘excess deaths’ - that is, comparing the death rate since 7th October 2023 with what prevailed before (which was the already profoundly adverse circumstances of siege).

But we can look at precedent here. From 2015 onwards, Yemen collapsed into brutal civil war, which included Western-backed Saudi-led military intervention which was responsible for the violent killings of countless civilians. According to UN estimates in 2020, over the space of 5 years, the war caused 233,000 deaths. But it noted that 131,000 of those deaths were from indirect causes - such as lack of food, health services and infrastructure. In other words - most deaths in Yemen’s war were not caused by violence, they were indirectly caused by the damage inflicted on the means of survival.

Indeed, the horrors in Yemen offer some brutal context for the scale of catastrophe imposed on the people of Gaza. You’ll often get apologists for Israel’s genocide playing a truly disgusting game, where they discover the horrors of Yemen for one reason only - to undermine caring about the slaughter of Palestinians. Why aren’t you talking about Yemen! They cry. Well, I’ve written column after column, and even recorded a documentary about it in a Yemeni refugee camp.

So I’m certainly not saying this to belittle the horrors of Yemen - which I know to be shocking in their own right - to point out that Gaza’s fate has been much much much worse. In Yemen, which was the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, those 233,000 deaths were over the course of half a decade. To compare like and like, those violent deaths were an estimated 102,000 over five years. The estimated violent deaths in Gaza are 62,260 violent deaths over the space of nine months. The absolute annual rate of killings is much worse in Gaza.

But it gets even more disturbing. The pre-war population of Yemen was about 30 million. The pre-war population of Gaza was between 2.2 million and 2.3 million. So just going on direct violent deaths - the rate of killing in Gaza is so much higher.

If you went by the official death toll in Gaza, which is clearly a dramatic underestimate, that means around 2%, or 1 in 50 Palestinians in Gaza have suffered violent deaths since 7th October. If you go by the figures of The Lancet’s study, around 3% of Gaza’s population suffered violent deaths in the first 9 months, which is around 1 in every 34 people living in Gaza being violently killed in the time it takes to conceive and deliver a baby. That’s without having any idea what the number of indirect deaths are, which in Yemen were greater than Gaza’s death, and Yemen as a whole did not suffer the total level of destruction. It should also be noted that there were multiple parties guilty of the killings in Yemen - the Saudi-led coalition being obviously a very big contributor, but certainly not the only one. In Gaza, it is the Israeli state responsible for the mass slaughter.

That’s why a study by Israeli newspaper Haaretz all the way back in August found that Gaza’s so-called conflict was one of the bloodiest in the 21st century, as they put it. Note they used the official death toll, that is the underestimate. And they found that, for example, 405,000 were killed in Syria’s civil war over the course of 13 years, or around 2% of the population. They noted that was the same proportion as Gaza in the space of 10 months. The numbers killed in Ukraine were hideous, but they noted a much smaller proportion over a longer time period - and indeed despite Putin’s undeniable war crimes, a large majority of those killed there are soldiers in what is a meat grinder.

The Israeli state will clearly go to great lengths to prevent the world from ever seeing what it has done to Gaza. We rely on the work of the lions of the world’s press pack - the journalists of Gaza, who have suffered the biggest slaughter of media workers in history as they desperately try and show the world the scale of the depravity. We have no idea what the total death toll is - the direct and indirect deaths, but three other health experts back in July estimated 186,000 deaths in a letter to The Lancet.

What we do know is this is the worst rate of killing since the Rwandan Genocide of 1994. We also know that there is no end in sight. How long is this going to go on for? Even if this slaughter ended now and the borders of Gaza were completely opened to humanitarian aid and there was a massive reconstruction effort, a large number of people would still die as a consequence of Israel’s onslaught. And there is no sign that is going to happen.

There may be some unknowns, but the overall picture is clear. There is no excuse for not knowing that a crime of biblical proportions is being facilitated by Western powers. No one can claim - in all honesty - they did not know. Which is why this evidence is crucial not just to hold to account Israel’s leaders and the Western leaders who aided and abetted them - but everyone with power and influence who legitimised this abomination, or who did and said little of any worth when they had the opportunity.

PS: I’m hiring a brilliant video and social media expert to do a big relaunch: revamping the YouTube channel (you’ll see!), and crucially a huge expansion on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and so on. With the far right dramatically on the rise, the left fixing our social media strategy is crucial. You can support the expansion by becoming a subscriber or one-off support.