The Truth About Gaza's Death Toll – Part 3: What Do We Actually Know?
Dr. Feroze Sidhwa examines the robust investigations of Israel's killing, and challenges Americans to decide whether Israel should be allowed to use US weapons & money to extinguish an entire people.
Editor’s note: This is the last article of a three-part series unpacking the real death toll in Gaza. To read part one, which examines the historical context of Israel’s decades of assaults on Gaza, click here. For part two, which dives deep into the scientific studies about the undercount of those killed, click here.
We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours.
-Former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh to General David Petraeus
To say that the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza’s (MoH) list of dead since Oct. 7, 2023, is an undercount is an understatement, to say the least. As I examined in Part 2 of this series (if you missed it, read it here), the most conservative reading of the three scientific studies of the death toll in Gaza shows that the MoH’s data is at least a 34.7% to 41.8% undercount of violent deaths in the enclave. A perfectly sensible reading of these studies is that the MoH death toll is a more than 67% undercount.
There are also a number of non-scientific but nevertheless robust investigations of the assault that are worth examining. Unlike the scientific studies, they can’t help us quantify the level of killing. However, they provide many useful comparisons to other events. These comparisons reveal that the “conflicts” most similar to the assault on Gaza are not wars at all, but the current slaughter in Sudan and the genocides in Srebrenica and Rwanda.
Killing of Civilians
Airwars, a British non-governmental research firm, investigates how air campaigns affect civilians in wartime. Through painstaking open-source investigations – combing through news, social media, etc. – Airwars has created a public archive of “civilian harm incidents” and reports based on that information. They’ve studied 12 conflicts so far, including the current assault on Gaza.
Airwars’s first investigation into the Gaza death toll, released in July 2024, examined the first 17 days of the attack, Oct. 7-24, 2023. “Airwars researchers tracked more allegations of civilian harm” in those 17 days “than in any month of its 10-year history of monitoring – including the US-led campaign against ISIS, the NATO-led coalition in Libya and the Russian bombardment of Syria.” Even in the first 2.5 weeks of the assault, when real-time MoH data collection was the most robust it could possibly be, they found only 75% of civilian deaths were recorded by the MoH.
Another investigation, published in December 2024, examined the first 25 days of the assault, from Oct. 7-31, 2023. “By almost every metric,” Airwars concluded, “the harm to civilians from the first month of the Israeli campaign in Gaza is incomparable with any 21st century air campaign. It is by far the most intense, destructive, and fatal conflict for civilians that Airwars has ever documented.”
In those 25 days, Airwars reported between 5,139 and 6,668 civilians killed, the lesser of which is “nearly four times the number of civilians killed in the most lethal month previously documented by Airwars: March 2017, where at least 1,470 civilians were killed by the US coalition in Iraq.” Furthermore, this is “a known undercount as Airwars’s work is ongoing, with additional civilian deaths from the period [in Gaza] still under analysis.”
Airwars generously sent me the additional data they’ve collected since then, totaling 696 incidents of civilian harm in the first 25 days of the assault. The updated data shows between 6,311 and 8,153 civilians were killed from Oct. 7-31, 2023. In other words, 4.2 to 5.5 times as many civilians were killed in the first 25 days of the US-Israeli attack on Gaza than in the deadliest month for civilians Airwars has ever documented.
But even this is a dramatic misrepresentation of the level of civilian killing in Gaza. Iraq in 2017 was a country of 36.3 million people, while Gaza in 2023 was a territory of 2.2 million. Adjusting for the size of the two populations, the rate of killing of civilians in Gaza from Oct. 7-31, 2023, was 88 to 113 times higher than in the deadliest month for civilians ever documented by Airwars. (In epidemiology, “rate” refers to a number of instances per unit of time, which is how I’m using the term here and below. In technical terms, the number of civilians killed per 1,000 people per day was 88 to 113 times higher in Gaza than in the deadliest month for civilians Airwars has ever documented.)