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More than 75,000 Palestinians were killed in the first 15 months of Israel’s military assault on Gaza, a figure far higher than the 49,000 deaths Gazan health officials announced for that period, according to a new study by The Lancet Global Health medical journal.
The peer-reviewed study, published Wednesday, found women, children and the elderly comprised 56.2 per cent of violent deaths in Gaza during that period, roughly aligning with reporting by Gaza’s health ministry.
The field work was conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, run by Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki, who has carried out public opinion polling in the West Bank and Gaza for decades. The lead author is Michael Spagat, a professor at Royal Holloway, University of London.
The study is the first independent population survey of mortality in the Gaza Strip, said its authors, whose research involved surveying 2,000 Palestinian households over seven days starting on Dec. 30, 2024.
Surveyors asked respondents how many people in their household had been killed in the 15 months since Israel’s assault on Gaza began in retaliation for the Hamas-led attacks on the country on Oct. 7, 2023.
“The combined evidence suggests that, as of Jan. 5, 2025, 3-4 per cent of the population of the Gaza Strip had been killed violently and there have been a substantial number of non-violent deaths caused indirectly by the conflict,” the authors wrote.
Death toll bitterly disputed
The Gaza death toll has been bitterly disputed since Israel’s assault began. Gaza health authorities, whose figures the United Nations has long deemed reliable, report more than 72,000 have been killed in the 28 months since October 2023, and estimate thousands more remain uncounted beneath destroyed buildings.
Israel has questioned those tallies, citing Hamas control of the ministry, though a senior military officer told Israeli media last month its figures were broadly accurate — a view the army later said did not reflect official data.
Lancet researchers said their analysis contradicts claims of inflation and suggests the ministry numbers are, if anything, conservative under extreme conditions.
Researchers who published a statistical analysis last year for The Lancet found the health ministry likely undercounted deaths by about 40 per cent during the first nine months of the war. The new research appears to suggest an undercount by a similar margin.
A new report published in The Lancet journal suggests that the number of people killed in Gaza in the first nine months of the Israel-Hamas war could be 40 per cent higher than reported by Hamas officials.
Face-to-face interviews
Field staff, mostly female and experienced in surveying, conducted face-to-face interviews with Palestinians from households across Gaza’s different districts, the authors wrote. The questionnaire, reviewed by Reuters, asks respondents to list individuals in their immediate household who were killed.
“We calculated mortality estimates as weighted sums. Each individual in the sample received a weight representing the number of people in the Gaza Strip they represent,” the authors wrote.
The authors wrote that the survey was the first on Gaza mortality that did not rely on administrative records from the health ministry. They said their results on violent deaths had a 95 per cent confidence interval, a value that indicates how accurately a pollster has captured a data point.
In addition to the 75,200 violent deaths estimated during the first 15 months of the war, there were an estimated 16,300 non-violent deaths — caused by disease, pre-existing conditions, accidents or other causes not directly related to combat — the authors wrote.
Hamas-led militants killed more than 1,200 people and took over 250 hostages during their October 2023 attack on southern Israel, according to Israeli tallies. The hostages and the remains of those killed in captivity have since been released during ceasefires.
Hamas has confirmed the deaths of military leaders in fighting with Israel but has rarely disclosed fatalities among its fighters.
