The Persistent Underreporting of Gaza’s Death Toll

What’s the death toll in Gaza? Whatever number came to mind—hold it. This 650 report aims to explain why it’s probably drastically off.

On January 29, 2026—the 845th day of the ongoing genocide in Palestine—Haaretz reported, “IDF [sic] Accepts Gaza Health Ministry Estimate of Over 70,000 Palestinians Killed During the War [sic].” Subsequently, many media outlets have published reports with similar headlines.

One of the reasons this story is considered “newsworthy” is because pro-Zionism actors and institutions have disputed the death toll with the objective of propagating genocide denialism.

Within a week after Israel’s response to the Hamas-led 2023 Al Aqsa Flood Operation, Israeli historian Raz Segal called the ongoing assault “a textbook case of genocide unfolding in front of our eyes.” On October 25, 2023, former U.S. President Joe Biden stated that he has “no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using” regarding the death toll.

Reuters debunked Biden’s claim two days later, following widespread challenges to it. This claim by Biden had a similar impact on coverage of the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people by US-backed Israel as his false testimony about seeing photographs of “beheaded babies.” Another lie associated with the Al Aqsa Flood Operation is about mass sexual violence. It has been debunked multiple times, recently by Reem Alsalem, UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls

A recent report regarding the death toll in Gaza, an anonymous Israeli Occupation Force official told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “Israel has not published its own data on the death toll in Gaza to refute the ministry’s but has maintained that it has killed roughly two to three civilians for every militant.” This hardly sounds like a “shift” in stance to me.

On one hand, the headlines affirm the validity of the Palestinian Ministry of Health’s data, refuting allegations of its fabrication. Journalists such as Mehdi Hasan, Yuval Abraham, and many others [whom I admire] have tweeted these reports as a gotcha moment. At the same time, I believe these reports normalize a death toll that is significantly lower—which aligns with Israel’s agenda to downplay the ongoing genocide.

In July 2024, The Lancet, a leading UK-based medical journal founded in 1823, published a paper that stated, “In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths. Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.”

The 186,000 estimate is calculated by taking the reported direct deaths at that time (37,396) and adding 4× direct (149,584). The chart below contextualizes the scale of unreported killings in Gaza by Israel based on the latest death toll of 71660 in Gaza, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics and The Lancet’s findings. Even the lowest estimate of indirect deaths (3:1) leads to a plausible total death toll in Gaza of 286,640.

Like all propaganda, the Israeli narrative is built on repetition of falsehoods. Yet when it comes to challenging such narratives, the repetition of factually accurate information is often missing. Shouldn't each report that mentions the death toll also include the fact that the conservative estimate of killings in the ongoing Gaza conflict exceeds 200,000? Indeed, numbers cannot quantify the suffering of the Palestinian people. But the news we read plays a crucial role in understanding the world.

Dr. Norman Finkelstein, a prominent authority on the Israel-Palestine conflict, referenced Confucius in his September 2025 lecture, “Gaza, Truth, and the Battle for Free Speech,” at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, asserting, “The beginning of all wisdom is to correctly label things.”

Try asking your friend or favorite chatbot, ‘What is the latest death toll in Gaza?’ Their response will likely demonstrate that inaccurate framing of the ongoing genocide isn’t just a scholarly issue—it has real consequences on public opinion.