The death toll in the Gaza war could be significantly higher, researchers say

The Palestinian death toll from the Gaza war may be significantly higher than official figures reported by the Hamas-run health ministry, research published in the medical journal The Lancet suggests.

The UK-led study covered the first nine months of the warwhich began when Hamas gunmen attacked Israel on October 7, 2023.

It used data from the ministry, an online survey of relatives reporting deaths and obituaries. It is estimated that by June 30, 2024 64,260 Palestinians died from traumatic injuries, an underreporting of deaths by 41%.

The Israeli embassy in the UK said “any information that emanates from Gaza” and serves Hamas cannot be trusted.

The UN considers the Ministry of Health’s data to be reliable.

The ministry’s data does not distinguish between combatants and civilians, but a recent UN report said the majority of confirmed victims over a six-month period were women and children.

Israel claims that Hamas’ data cannot be trusted. In August, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said they had “eliminated over 17,000 terrorists,” although it was unclear how they arrived at that figure. The IDF insists it only targets fighters and tries to avoid or minimize civilian casualties.

Israel does not allow international journalists from media organizations, including the BBC, independent access to Gaza, making fact-checking on the ground difficult.

The team behind the latest study used a statistical method called “capture-recapture,” a technique that has been used to estimate deaths in other conflicts.

Researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine tracked how many people turned up multiple times in different attempts to count deaths. The level of overlap between these lists suggests that the number of deaths directly caused by traumatic injuries in the conflict may be significantly higher than the hospital figures published by the Ministry of Health.

Gaza’s Ministry of Health publishes daily updates on the number of casualties from the war. It collects data from deaths registered in hospitals, deaths reported by family members and deaths from “reliable media reports”.

The report in The Lancet estimated the number of deaths at between 55,298–78,525, compared with 37,877 reported by the Ministry of Health.

The figures in the report may be significantly higher or lower depending on the technical details of the analysis.

For example, identifying deaths by “traumatic injury” in any data set can be difficult. Getting it wrong can raise or lower survey scores.

The study also said that 59% of those killed, for whom gender and age data were available, were women, children and the elderly.

The Gaza war was sparked by a Hamas attack that killed around 1,200 people and took another 251 back to Gaza as hostages. Israel launched a massive military offensive against Gaza in response.

The health ministry says 46,006 people, most of them civilians, have been killed by the Israeli campaign.