Nearly 100,000 Palestinians, around 4% of Gaza’s population, have been killed in Israel’s genocidal war on the territory, according to a report published Friday by the leading Israeli newspaper, Haaretz.
Haaretz cited several reports by independent, international experts to determine that Gaza’s Health Ministry has grossly underestimated the death toll at 56,300 since October 2023.
It added that besides the high number of Palestinian deaths in Israeli attacks, many people died from the indirect effects of the war, like hunger and diseases, amid a total collapse of the health system in Gaza.
The daily said while Israeli spokespersons, journalists and influencers "reject with knee-jerk disgust the death toll announced by Gaza’s Health Ministry as exaggerated," more and more international experts "are stating that not only is this list, with all the horror it embodies, reliable – but that it may even be very conservative in relation to reality.”
It cited a study conducted by professor Michael Spagat, an economist at Holloway College at the University of London, a world-class expert on mortality in violent conflicts.
The study surveyed 2,000 households in the Palestinian enclave, comprising almost 10,000 people.
"They concluded that, as of January 2025, some 75,200 people died a violent death in Gaza during the war, the vast majority caused by Israeli munitions," it said.
According to the survey's data, 56% of those killed have been either children up to the age of 18 or women.
"That's an exceptional figure when compared with almost every other conflict since World War II," Haaretz said.
Spagat said the survey’s data position the Gaza war "as one of the bloodiest conflicts of the 21st century."
"Even if the overall number of war victims in Syria, Ukraine and Sudan is higher in each case, Gaza is apparently in first place in terms of the ratio of combatants to noncombatants killed, as well as in terms of rate of death relative to population size."
Data also show that the proportion of women and children killed via a violent death in Gaza is more than double the proportion in almost every other recent conflict, including Kosovo (20%), northern Ethiopia (9%), Syria (20%), and Sudan (23%).
"I think we’re probably at something like 4% of the population killed," Spagat said. "I’m not sure that there’s another case in the 21st century that’s reached that high."
The Israeli army has pursued a brutal offensive against Gaza since October 2023, despite international calls for a cease-fire.
Last November, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
Israel also faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice for its war on the enclave.
