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According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, more than 20,000 people have been killed in the Gaza Strip in the war between Israel and Hamas.
According to Israeli officials, Hamas militants led an attack on Israel on October 7 that killed more than 1,200 people. Israel's response – a full-scale bombardment of Gaza and a ground invasion – has killed nearly one in 100 people in Gaza.
Gaza's Health Ministry said early Friday that 20,057 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks since October 7.
The death toll is far higher than in any conflict in Gaza in recent history. And it is more than the estimated 15,000 Palestinians killed in the violence that followed the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. Palestinians call this mass expulsion the Nakba, or “the catastrophe.”
Neta C. Crawford, co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University, which tracks the number of conflicts, said the population death rate is similar to 20th century wars.
“This is a significant and extraordinary level of destruction in the 21st century,” she said.
Why News Agencies and the UN Rely on Gaza's Health Ministry for Death Toll
The number of people killed in Gaza since October 7 is disputed. The Washington Post and other media outlets rely on figures from the Gaza Health Ministry, as did many international institutions, organizations and global bodies before the war. The ministry has proven reliable in the past and has direct access to hospitals and morgues. It issues death certificates for Palestinians living in the enclave.
However, Israeli and U.S. officials have publicly questioned the numbers, arguing that they cannot be trusted because the ministry is controlled by Hamas, which both countries label a terrorist group. Both governments have noted that no distinction is made between combatants and civilians.
“The only numbers Israel and the IDF have [Israel Defense Forces] “I can estimate with some certainty the number of Hamas terrorists killed since the Oct. 7 attack,” an Israeli official said this month on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. The official said that “several thousand” Hamas fighters had been killed at that point, a small part of a force estimated at 30,000.
The war makes it difficult to count the dead. Gaza's Health Ministry suspended updating the death toll last month, citing communications failures and lack of access to besieged hospitals, but later resumed the count.
While the United Nations often releases its own counts after a conflict, in Gaza it relies for now on figures from the Gaza Ministry of Health given the information available. U.N. officials said they see no reason to doubt the figures but acknowledged that for practical reasons the figures could prove inaccurate.
At a meeting of the World Health Organization's Executive Board, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus cited the Gaza Health Ministry's figures and suggested that it may actually be an undercount.
“We don’t know how many are buried under the rubble of their homes,” said Tedros, who heads a U.N. agency that works directly with Gaza’s health ministry.
The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, has killed 134 staff working in Gaza since Oct. 7, said William Deere, the agency's representative in Washington.
A team of academic health data experts at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health examined the number of deaths of UN workers in Gaza and used the data to estimate whether the Gaza Health Ministry's death toll was inflated.
They found “no evidence” of excess mortality in the data, the experts wrote in a letter published earlier this month in the medical journal Lancet.
“The actual death toll is likely higher than reported due to difficulty checking bodies buried under rubble and limited hospital system capacity,” one of the experts, Benjamin Q. Huynh, added in an email .
The bombing of Gaza, particularly in the north in the early stages of the war, was intense by any measure. The densely populated enclave, where more than 2 million people live in cramped towns and refugee camps, and the presence of military installations in civilian areas have contributed to a significant death toll.
Unguided “dumb bombs” were used in almost half of Israel’s attacks on Gaza
Analysts say the heavy destruction of infrastructure, particularly in northern Gaza, indicates the use of large bombs such as the 2,000-pound Mark 84 bombs.
While these huge bombs can be converted into precision weapons using the US-supplied JDAM system, a US intelligence assessment found that almost half of the munitions Israel has used in Gaza since the start of the war have been unguided bombs, an unusually high rate Share for a high-tech military like the IDF.
The pace of death does not appear to have slowed as the conflict has continued. From October 7 to November 24, when a weeks-long lull in conflict began, an average of 277 deaths were recorded each day in Gaza. According to the Health Ministry, the average number of daily deaths has risen to over 300 since fighting began on December 1.
The Biden administration has begun pressing Israel to slow the pace of its conflict. President Biden told his supporters at a recent campaign rally that “indiscriminate bombings” would begin to cost Israel global support.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan told Israeli officials that they should “transition to lower-intensity operations in the near future,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby later told reporters.
Biden shows deep compassion for the Israelis. Some feel that Gazans are lacking.
In late November, the Biden administration submitted an estimate to Congress that the death toll in Gaza was more than 15,000, close to the figure reported by the Gaza Health Ministry at the time.
IDF spokesman Jonathan Conricus made the comments during an appearance on social media in early December suggested that the Israeli military would do so soon present an “analysis of the claims of the Hamas-controlled and so-called Gaza Ministry of Health.” In the same appearance, Conricus reiterated the claim that the number of dead militants in Gaza “is in the thousands.”
Israel claims progress against Hamas as humanitarian crisis worsens
Brian Finucane, a State Department lawyer under the Obama administration and senior adviser to the International Crisis Group, said that under the rules of war, the IDF would be expected to determine the potential civilian death toll of an attack before it began.
The aim would be to ensure that any harm to the civilian population is proportionate to the expected military advantage. “Whether they would ever release them is another question,” Finucane said of those estimates.
The high death toll in Gaza undermines arguments that Israel is avoiding civilian deaths, Crawford said.
“When you do so well trying to avoid harm from non-combatants, you need to rethink the way you conduct and aim the attacks,” she said.