There is a moment when numbers stop being statistics and become stories. It happened in Gaza, where for the first time independent researchers managed to carry out a direct investigation of the victims of the conflict. House by house, family by family, they collected testimonies that tell a reality that is harsher than the official one. Eighty-four thousand dead in Gaza. More than double what has been declared so far. A toll that changes the substance of what is happening in the Strip: for the perception, I think it will be hard.
First Independent Count of Gaza Deaths
For fifteen months, the world has relied on Palestinian Ministry of Health data (which in turn has been contradicted by Israeli data) to understand the scale of the human losses in Gaza. Fifty-six thousand dead according to official figures as of June 25, 2025. Now comes the first independent study to call everything into question.
Researchers from the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah, in collaboration with international experts, conducted a direct survey among the population. A week of fieldwork, starting on December 30, 2024, to collect data from 2.000 families representative of the entire Strip.
The result? Nearly 84.000 people dead between October 2023 and January 2025. Of these, 75.200 for violent causes and 8.540 for indirect causes related to the conflict. Numbers that do not take into account the last 5 months, with a possible much more dramatic toll, and completely change the scale of this human tragedy.
The methodology behind the numbers
I study, published in Nature and conducted according to rigorous scientific standards, used a direct approach: face-to-face interviews with adults from randomly selected families.
Each respondent was asked to list all family members present on October 6, 2023, including children born subsequently, and to report the fate of each: alive, dead, or missing. For those who had lost their lives, the researchers asked them to specify whether the death was due to violent causes or not. A method that, according to Patrick Ball, a statistician at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group in San Francisco, represents an extraordinary piece of work considering the operating conditions.
The survey covered most of the Strip, excluding only Gaza City, northern Gaza and Rafah due to active fighting. This is definitely an underestimate: however, many residents of those areas had moved to the areas covered by the survey.
A tragedy that affects everyone
The data reveals that 59% of the deaths in Gaza as of January 2025 were women, children and the elderly. A distribution that photographs how this conflict has indiscriminately affected the civilian population. We are talking about approximately one in 35 of Gaza's pre-war population.
Michael Spagat, an economist at Royal Holloway University of London and co-author of the study, points out that there may have been even more non-violent deaths in the months following the survey. Debarati Guha-Sapir, an epidemiologist at the University of Louvain specializing in civil conflicts, highlights how the Palestinian health situation, good before the war, probably deteriorated as the conflict dragged on.
The limits of the official count
The investigation highlights the increasing difficulties the Gaza Ministry of Health is having in keeping an accurate count. Damaged health infrastructure, hospitals under attack and general chaos have made it increasingly difficult to systematically record deaths.
Laith Jamal Abu Raddad, an epidemiologist at Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar, emphasizes that the study remains relevant even though six months have passed since the data were collected. “The crisis persists and has probably intensified in the last three months,” he observes.
Deaths in Gaza, toll in line with other research
The results align with a previous study driven by Zeina Jamaluddine of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, which estimated 64.260 violent deaths up to the end of June 2024 using the “capture-recapture” method.
The The Lancet had published analyses that suggested a significant underestimation of official data, using hospital records, social media obituaries and online surveys.
Doubts about the verification
Mark Zlochin, an independent Israeli researcher, raises questions about the verifiability of the data, given that the study relies on testimonies without collecting names, birth dates or ID numbers of the deceased. Spagat responds that such collection would have violated the study's anonymity protocols.
The impossibility of including families in which no adults survived may have led to an underestimation, according to Abu-Raddad. Furthermore, the study was unable to verify deaths that occurred in the months following the survey.
Deaths in Gaza, Reality Demands Answers
The numbers tell a story that goes beyond the statistics. As I pointed out in this article, Gaza has become a laboratory for advanced military technologies, but above all it is home to over two million people who have been living under bombing for more than a year.
The truce between Hamas and Israel that ended on March 18 has given way to a resumption of hostilities that has further damaged hospitals (34 hospital complexes destroyed), schools and essential infrastructure. Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced from their homes, while humanitarian aid continues to be limited.
This is a situation that cannot and must not continue like this. Each issue of this study is a broken life, a destroyed family, a denied future. The international community must find the courage to make decisions that put an end to this spiral of violence. Because the 84.000 deaths in Gaza also dishonor the poor Israeli victims of October 7, and those still held hostage by Hamas.
The 84.000 (and more) dead in Gaza, to be honest, dishonor humanity.
