Robert A. Pape
After nearly 700 days of war, the death toll in Gaza has risen to extraordinary levels. Amid heavy bombardment that has turned the territory into a wasteland of rubble and stringent blockades that have led to mass hunger and even starvation, over 61,000 Palestinians have died and over 145,000 have been seriously wounded, according to Gaza’s Hamas-affiliated health authorities, which do not distinguish between civilians and Hamas fighters.
But the true number of the war’s casualties may far outstrip those figures, which do not include the thousands of bodies that remain under the rubble, the large number of dead that could not arrive at morgues, and the excess deaths from the destruction of infrastructure and the ensuing disease, famine, and lack of medical care. In February, the medical journal The Lancet published an extensive analysis based on a wide variety of sources (including obituaries) and estimated that the official death toll underreported the direct war deaths in Gaza by at least 41 percent and perhaps by as much as 107 percent, while not accounting at all for nontrauma-related deaths resulting from the impact of Israeli military operations on Gaza’s health services, food and water supplies, and sanitation.
In sum, the authors of the study suggested that Israel’s campaign has caused at least an additional 26,000 Palestinian deaths and perhaps as many as over 120,000 additional deaths, with the true death toll possibly upward of 186,000. Taking that into account, as of late July 2025, Israel’s war in Gaza has led to the deaths of between five to ten percent of the prewar population of about 2.2 million. This represents an unprecedented slaughter. Israel’s campaign in Gaza is the most lethal case of a Western democracy using the punishment of civilians as a tactic of war.
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