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21-02-2026
GAZA STRIP: The true human cost of Israel’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip has far exceeded previous official estimates, with independent research published in the world’s leading medical journals verifying more than 75,000 “violent deaths” by early 2025.
The findings, emerging from a landmark series of scientific papers, suggest that administrative records from the Gaza Ministry of Health (MoH) represent a conservative “floor” rather than an over-count, and provide a rigorous bedrock to the scale of Palestinian loss.
The Gaza Mortality Survey (GMS), a population-representative household study published in The Lancet Global Health, estimated 75,200 “violent deaths” between October 7, 2023 and January 5, 2025. This figure represents approximately 3.4 percent of Gaza’s pre-conflict 2.2 million population and sits 34.7 percent higher than the 49,090 “violent deaths” reported by the MoH for the same period.
The Gaza Health Ministry estimates that as of February 16, at least 72,063 people have been killed since the start of the war. Of those, 603 people have been killed since the declaration of a “ceasefire” in the Gaza Strip on October 10, 2025.
Israel has consistently questioned the ministry’s figures but an Israeli army official told journalists in the country in January that the army accepted that about 70,000 people had been killed in Gaza during the war.
Despite the higher figure, researchers noted that the demographic composition of casualties where women, children, and the elderly comprise 56.2 percent of those killed remains remarkably consistent with official Palestinian reporting.
Scientific validation of the toll
The GMS, which interviewed 2,000 households representing 9,729 individuals, provides a rigorous empirical foundation for a death toll.
Michael Spagat, a professor of economics at Royal Holloway University of London and the study’s lead author, found that while MoH reporting remains reliable, it is inherently conservative due to the collapse of the very infrastructure required to document death.
Notably, this research advances upon findings published in The Lancet in January 2025, which used statistical “capture-recapture” modelling to estimate 64,260 deaths during the war’s first nine months.
While that earlier study relied on probability to flag undercounts, this report shifts from mathematical estimation to empirical verification through direct household interviews. It extends the timeline through January 2025, confirming a violent toll exceeding 75,000 and quantifying, for the first time, the burden of “non-violent excess mortality”.
According to a separate commentary in the same publication, the systematic destruction of hospitals and administrative centres has created a “central paradox” where the more devastating the harm to the health system, the more difficult it becomes to analyse the total death toll.
Verification is further hindered by thousands of bodies still buried under rubble or mutilated beyond recognition. Beyond direct violence, the survey estimated 16,300 “non-violent deaths”, including 8,540 “excess” deaths caused directly by the deterioration of living conditions and the blockade-induced collapse of the medical sector.
Researchers highlighted that the MoH figures appear to be conservative and reliable, dispelling misinformation campaigns aimed at discrediting Palestinian casualty data. “The validation of MoH reporting through multiple independent methodologies supports the reliability of its administrative casualty recording systems even under extreme conditions,” the study concluded. (Int’l News Desk)
