According to findings announced by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and published in The Lancet journal, there were an estimated 64,260 “traumatic injury deaths” in Gaza between October 7, 2023 and June 30, 2024. The Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza put the figure at 37,877 at the time.
This means the ministry has underreported the death toll due to violence by approximately 41%, the researchers found. As of October, the number of Gazans killed by violence was thought to exceed 70,000, the study said, based on the estimated underreporting rate.
The total death toll attributable to Israel’s military campaign is likely to be higher still, it said, as its analysis doesn’t account for deaths caused by disruption to health care, insufficient food, clean water and sanitation, and disease outbreaks.
Official death tolls are always an undercount. Even after mundane disasters like hurricanes, the death toll gets revised up during the cleanup as more victims are discovered. The disaster in Gaza is still ongoing, so people have more important things to do than count the dead.
In addition to this, the Gaza Health Ministry has taken a deliberately conservative approach of only counting bodies that make it to a hospital and are clearly dead as a direct result of the conflict (e.g, not disease or famine).
The official death count is not a reflection of how many people are dying. It is a reflection of the Gaza Health Ministry’s capacity to count the dead.