How many people have died in Gaza?
From the very start of Israel’s war against Hamas, the death toll in Gaza has been disputed. On May 8th the controversy over the numbers, which media organisations including The Economist use, intensified after the un appeared to revise down its death toll for women and children. The un switched from using the overall figures provided by the Gaza Ministry of Health (moh)—which is controlled by Hamas—to using a count that included only people who had been identified. Some saw this as proof that the moh death toll is bogus. In reality the count has inevitably become less reliable as the war has dragged on. The list of identifiable dead is legitimate and marks the lower estimate for the lives lost in the war—about 25,000 at the very least, of whom around 14,000 are women, children or old people.
At the war’s start the moh death toll was probably fairly accurate. At this time, the numbers were based solely on deaths registered at hospitals and morgues. In past Gaza conflicts, the figures produced by moh matched those independently calculated by both the un and Israel.
On October 26th, the moh released the names, ids and ages of everyone it claimed had died in the war. It put the death toll at around 7,000, 68% of them women, children under 18, or people older than 60. Two academic articles published last year in the Lancet, a medical journal, analysed the patterns of ids and ages and the implied death tolls of different age groups, and concluded that the figure seemed right.
But as the fighting has continued, the quality of the overall moh death count has dipped. Most hospitals can no longer collect data. In mid-November, the moh began to add deaths from media reports to the hospital death count (see chart). This is a routine way to estimate deaths during wars, but it is fallible. The media may focus on recording deaths of innocents. Some deaths can be missed, where bodies are buried under rubble, say. Others may be double-counted. Commentators, particularly pro-Israeli ones, have been quick to point out inconsistencies in the moh figures. Sometimes the supposed cumulative male death toll drops from one day to the next.
The moh continues periodically to publish credible named lists of the dead. These include only deaths registered through the hospital system, and more recently via an online form for reporting dead relatives. The un, the World Health Organisation and Human Rights Watch, a monitor, say they are trustworthy. The Israel Defence Forces (idf) produced an analysis, seen by The Economist, of the named list published on January 6th. The idf confirmed that most—83% of the 14,121—were real people, whose name and id matched official records. The rest were either missing an id number, had an invalid number, or the name and id did not match records. Of those identified, only 1,407 were verified as Hamas militants or members.
An analysis of the list including deaths up to March 30th by Mike Spagat of Royal Holloway University and Every Casualty Counts, a charity, found that 84% of the 21,703 entries appeared complete, with a valid id. Our analysis of the latest list of deaths until April 30th found that 84% of the 24,686 ids were valid.
In other words, while not all entries on the named list are complete, there is good reason to believe those on it are dead. That would mean, as of April 30th, that at least 24,686 Palestinians had died during the war—of whom at least 13,816 were women, children or old people—around 70% of the total that the moh says have died. Even Israel has indicated it expects the true death toll to be higher than the moh list would imply. The idf claims to have killed 14,000 militants, but the list contains fewer than 10,000 working-age men. In March the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, said that up to 32,500 people may have been killed in Gaza, and that up to 60% of them were civilians. Whatever the true figure, the loss of life has been immense. ■
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