What is the estimated death toll in Gaza?
Since October 7, 2023, more than 39,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have been killed and nearly 91,000 injured as a result of Israeli attacks on Gaza by land, air and water. Tens of thousands of Palestinians remain under the rubble.
What is the death toll?
In the early months of the war, the death toll was calculated only by counting the bodies that arrived at hospitals and by providing information including the names and passport numbers of the victims.
As the conflict continued, with most hospitals and morgues out of business, authorities had to resort to other methods.
Since May, the Ministry of Health has updated the death toll by adding unrecognizable bodies to the total number of dead.
Deaths reported online by family members are also being counted.
Is the death toll complete?
According to the Ministry of Health, the figures do not reflect the total number of victims, as many are still under the rubble. In May alone, an estimated 10,000 deaths were unaccounted for.
The medical journal The Lancet published a letter by three academics on July 5, which suggested that indirect deaths due to factors such as disease may be many times higher than official estimates, and possibly as high as 186,000.
The U.N. human rights office and the Yale School of Public Health's Laboratory for Humanitarian Studies also said the actual numbers were much higher than reported, but they also did not know the true numbers.
How reliable is the death toll?
Before the war, Gaza's population statistics and health information systems were more robust and accurate than those in many Middle Eastern countries, public health experts told Reuters.
The United Nations routinely cites the ministry's death toll figures and cites the ministry as the source, while the World Health Organization has given them full credit.
At the start of the war, after US President Joe Biden cast doubt on the death toll, Gaza's Ministry of Health released a detailed list of the 7,028 deaths recorded so far. On July 24, it published a new list containing the names of 28,185 victims identified until the end of June.
The Palestinian Ministry of Health estimates that approximately 70 percent of those killed in most of the conflict are women and children.
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