Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – A team of researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Yale has published a study in The Lancet finding that the Gaza Ministry of Health substantially underestimated war deaths in Gaza. Casualties were 69% higher than reported.
The current estimate by the Ministry of Health for Palestinians killed by Israeli weaponry in their total war on Gaza is 46,000. The Lancet study suggests the true number today is closer to 70,000.
Researchers said that they used data from the Palestinian Ministry of Health hospital records, a Ministry of Health online survey, and obituaries that appeared on social media to estimate the true number of deaths between October 7, 2023, and June 30, 2024.
The researchers then used statistical models to look at the overlap between these sources. After combining the results, they calculated the estimated total deaths during this period. They then compared age- and sex-specific death rates with those from 2022. This method has been used successfully in other conflict zones.
The team estimated 64,260 deaths due to traumatic injury (i.e. by military weaponry) during the study period, October – June. The Ministry of Health estimate at that time was 37,877 (that is, the actual number was 69% higher)
AFP interviewed Patrick Ball, a sociologist of human rights on whose doctoral committee I served years ago, about the method. He has used it to estimate deaths in conflicts “in Guatemala, Kosovo, Peru and Colombia.” AFP writes that he told the agency that “the well-tested technique had been used for centuries and that the researchers had reached ‘a good estimate’ for Gaza.”
Women, minors under 18, and the elderly over 65 comprised 59.1% of those killed militarily, or 28,257 deaths among those for whom sex and age information was known.
It should be pointed out that only a small number of military-age men were members of the paramilitary al-Qassam Brigades or the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, so that the percentage of innocent civilians among the dead is much higher than 59%.
Juan Cole, Gaza Yet Stands. Informed Comment KDP. Click here to Buy or order the paperback from your local bookstore. All proceeds go to UNICEF for their Gaza work.
In the U.S. Afghanistan war, the Watson Institute at Brown estimated that some 271,000 people were killed, including 71,344 civilians. That would indicate that 29.6% of those killed were innocent civilians. Over-all, the civilian kill ratio is most wars is 30% to 50%, so the Israeli military in Gaza is clearly much more brutal than the norm.
The researchers found peaks of deaths in the first three months of the Gaza War, in autumn 2023. This was a time when we know that the Israeli air force dropped hundreds of 2000-lb. bombs on residential complexes. A United Nations study found that in many of these attacks, no clear military target was visible.
The casualties spiked again in June, during the Israeli campaign against Rafah, which the Biden administration and the International Court of Justice had forbidden as a red line because it was the last part of the Gaza Strip that still had the urban infrastructure to keep people alive and healthy. The Israelis razed it and expelled its inhabitants, many of them being displaced for a third or fourth time, to already-destroyed neighborhoods in the center.
The team found that deaths were under-reported by 41% by the Ministry of Health. Most of the newspaper reporting misunderstood this way of stating the statistic. What they found was that casualties were 59% more numerous than the Ministry of Health reported.
The study only treated deaths from military actions and weaponry (“traumatic”) deaths. Last July, the Lancet published an estimate that as of that moment, 186,000 Palestinians in Gaza would die over time because of infectious diseases, exposure, and lack of water and food, as a result of Israeli strategy and tactics. That number is surely much higher now.
© 2025 All Rights Reserved