SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
haaretz
Israeli Analysis Affirms Gaza Health Ministry’s Official Palestinian Death Count
One Israeli expert placed discrepancies in the list at "around 1%." Another said the error rate appears even lower.
Feb 24, 2026
An Israeli analysis published Tuesday examining the Gaza Health Ministry's list of Palestinians killed during Israel's US-backed annihilation of the Gaza Strip largely affirmed the official death count, while noting some imperfections in the 2,000-page document.
Haaretz, Israel's oldest daily newspaper, dissected the Gaza Health Ministry's (GHM) database of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in Gaza, which at the time contained nearly 70,000 names—it's now over 72,000—in part by using artificial intelligence to analyze the massive file.
"A consensus has taken shape: Even if the list has weaknesses, including the fact that it does not differentiate between combatants and civilians, it reflects the scale of the disaster inflicted on Gaza and its people," article author Nir Hasson wrote. "It also forms the basis for allegations that Israel committed war crimes, crimes against humanity, and even genocide."
Lee Mordechai, a historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who says Israeli is committing genocide in Gaza, told Hasson, "It's clear that the list isn't 100% accurate and that it has errors, but I think they're around 1%."
Gabriel Epstein, an associate at the US-based Israel Policy Forum who was formerly skeptical of the GHM list, "now believes it is largely accurate and may even slightly undercount the dead," according to Hasson.
"Epstein reviewed the list obtained by Haaretz," the article states. "He found 24 duplicates and 38 entries with problems in the ID numbers. That means 99.91% of the entries were complete, with verified ID numbers. He also found that 64 deaths that had appeared on earlier lists were later removed, while 158 names removed by March of last year were added back."
The GHM list notably only contains the names of people who died from combat-related violence, not from "hunger, disease, accidents, or the collapse of the health system."
It also does not include the thousands of people who are missing and likely dead and buried beneath the rubble of the 80% of Gaza's buildings that have been destroyed or damaged during the war.
Other research, including multiple peer-reviewed studies in the prestigious British medical journal the Lancet, have also concluded that the ministry was undercounting the number of people killed by Israel's war on Gaza.
As for the issue of Hamas not differentiating between combatants and civilians on the ministry's death list, an investigation last year by Israeli journalist and filmmaker Yuval Abraham and Guardian senior international affairs correspondent Emma Graham-Harrison analyzed classified Israel Defense Forces intelligence data showing that 5 in 6 Palestinians killed by Israeli troops through the first 19 months of the war were civilians. The probe obliterated IDF claims of a historically low civilian-to-combatant kill ratio.
Last September, Former IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi—who was in command for much of the war—said that “over 10%” of Gaza’s approximately 2.2 million people “were killed or injured” since October 2023. Halevi’s acknowledgment tracked with GHM figures showing at least 228,815 people killed or wounded at the time.
In January, Israeli media outlets including Haaretz, the Jerusalem Post, and the Times of Israel reported that the IDF accepted the accuracy of GHM's death count, which at the time stood at over 71,000.
Israeli officials and media, along with their supportive US counterparts during both the Biden and Trump administrations, once cast doubt upon or outright denied GHM figures because the ministry is under Hamas' control. These aspersions came in addition to widespread Israeli and US denials of Israel’s forced famine and starvation deaths and IDF war crimes in Gaza.
"As the months have passed, claims of fabrication and exaggeration have largely remained confined to Israeli television panels," Hasson wrote in the new analysis. "At the end of January, an apparent dispute over the number of dead seemed to end in Israel when a senior army source confirmed that the IDF recognizes that 70,000 people died, precisely the figure cited by Gazan authorities."
"Even if the argument over the total number of dead is, for now, largely settled, disagreement in Israel continues over who the dead were," he continued. "How many were gunmen, how many were affiliated with Hamas, how many were killed under circumstances that meet the conditions of international law?"
"None of this alters the stark figures in the table," Hasson added. "Of the recorded deaths, 20,876, about 30%, are young girls, teenage girls, and women. Another 3,220 were aged 65 and over, including the final name on the list, Tamam al-Batsh, who was 110 when she died."
While Israel officials continue to insist that GHM figures are "misleading and unreliable"—or even "fake"—Hasson noted the general consistency between Israeli and Palestinian tallies across past Israeli attacks on Gaza. During Operation Cast Lead (2008-09), the Palestinian count was 23% higher than Israel's. For Operation Pillar of Success (2012), Israel's tally of Gazan deaths was 11% higher than the Palestinian figure. In Operation Protective Edge (2014), the Palestinian count was 8% higher. And during 2021's Operation Guardian of the Walls, Palestinian officials counted 10% more Gaza deaths than Israel.
The United Nations and US administrations of both major political parties have long acknowledged the GHM's accounting of Palestinian casualties in Israeli attacks, including the assault that began in October 2023.
Hasson noted that "it has been increasingly harder to find Israeli officials commenting on the subject" of the GHM death count in the ongoing war as evidence of its accuracy mounts.
"Since the war began," he said, "Israel has made no serious effort to demonstrate that the list is false or to present an alternative. It has not proven even once that a person listed as deceased is in fact alive."
Keep ReadingShow Less
'A Horror So Vast, It Could No Longer Be Ignored': US Media Finally Centering Starving Gazans
However, one critic lamented that corporate media "continues to act like starvation is the unfortunate byproduct of 'war.'"
Jul 25, 2025
As more and more Palestinians, mostly children, starve to death due to Israel's 657-day obliteration and siege of Gaza, reliably pro-Israel U.S. corporate media outlets in recent days have centered the starvation crisis—which began in October 2023—while critics have decried passive language and anti-Palestinian tropes used in some reporting.
The Washington Post published at least two articles on the subject in as many days, including an Associated Press story by Wafaa Shurafa, Sarah El Deeb, and Lee Keath titled "Dozens of Kids and Adults in Gaza Have Starved to Death in July as Hunger Surges" and an internal piece by Louisa Loveluck, Heba Farouk Mahfouz, Siham Shamalakh, Miriam Berger, and Abbie Cheeseman with the headline "Mass Starvation Stalks Gaza as Deaths Rise From Hunger." The authors of the latter article noted that "Israel has severely limited the amount of food entering Gaza, where society is on the brink of collapse."
The New York Times on Friday published a morning newsletter article by Lauren Jackson titled "The Starvation Spreading in Gaza," which stressed that "hunger in Gaza is not new" amid an Israeli blockade that has choked the strip "for nearly two decades." Jackson's piece followed a Thursday front-page story by Rawan Sheikh Ahmad, Isabel Kershner, and Abu Bakr Bashir, with images by Palestinian photographer Saher Alghorra, headlined "Gazans Are Dying of Starvation."
Palestinian peace activist Ihab Hassan, who heads the Agora Initiative's Human Rights for Gaza project, said on the social media site X, "Starvation in Gaza made it to the front page of The New York Times—a horror so vast, it could no longer be ignored."
Carnegie Middle East Center senior editor Michael Young wrote on X, "Don't underestimate that a mainstream media outlet in the U.S. is finally stating the obvious, that Gazans are dying of starvation."
"But it's not as if they're just dying, for no reason; they are being denied adequate amounts of food by Israel, therefore are being killed," Young added. "Nonetheless, that the NYT presents the story in so blunt a way, under a heartbreaking photograph, must qualify as a turning point of sorts given how reluctant U.S. media outlets are to say anything bad about Israel."
Assal Rad, a fellow at the Arab Center Washington D.C. and frequent media critic, offered a more accurate headline for the Times story—"ISRAEL IS STARVING PALESTINIANS TO DEATH."
Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting's Counterspin blog took aim at the Post's "Mass Starvation Stalks Gaza" headline, noting that "it's actual human beings stalking Gaza, who could right now choose to act differently."
Still, there have recently been remarkable discussions about Gaza in U.S. corporate media outlets that would have been all but unimaginable during past Israeli attacks on Palestine.
CNN's "NewsNight" with Abby Phillip on Thursday aired a panel discussion titled, "Why Is the U.S. Silent About the Starvation in Gaza?" The segment featured journalist Peter Beinart, who highighted the International Criminal Court's issuance of arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes including forced starvation, U.S. support for Israel's ethnic cleansing of Gaza, and the Israeli government's ban on foreign journalists entering the strip.
"To say the United States is silent, it's much worse than that," Beinart said. "We are profoundly complicit and deeply responsible. It is our weapons that enforce this starvation. It is our diplomatic efforts that prevent international justice from being done."
"The blood is on our hands!" he stressed.
The CNN segment also featured a video clip of United Nations World Food Program Director Cindy McCain, whose warnings of a looming starvation emergency in Gaza began in October 2023.
Asked by Phillip if the images of starving Gazans making headlines around the world marked "an inflection point," Beinart replied, "Why did it take this long?"
Meanwhile, Israel's oldest newspaper, Haaretz, ran an editorial Thursday titled "Israel Is Starving Gaza."
"Gaza is starving, and Israel is responsible," the Haaretz editors wrote. "According to the Gaza Health Ministry, 111 people have died from malnutrition since the war began, most of them children. Alarmingly, 43 of those deaths occurred just in the past week."
"The famine that has been created is another facet of Israel's cruel inhumanity towards the people of Gaza," the editors added. "It constitutes a war crime and a crime against humanity and is a clear violation of the orders issued a year and a half ago by the International Court of Justice in The Hague."
Keep ReadingShow Less
The Vilification of Zohran Mamdani–and Why He's Right About Israel's Genocide
Bloviating about Mamdani's alleged antisemitism for criticism of Israel has garnered more attention than a shocking report that Israeli soldiers are ordered to shoot at civilians waiting for aid in Gaza.
Jun 30, 2025
It says a lot about how corrupted U.S. politics have become that so many elected leaders, Republicans and Democrats, are more enraged about the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York City's opposition to the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza than they are about Israeli policy itself. And U.S. complicity with it.
That contradiction became especially apparent in recent days when the bloviating about Zohan Mamdani's alleged antisemitism for criticism of Israel has garnered more attention than a shocking report in an Israeli publication, Haaretz, that Israeli soldiers are "ordered to shoot deliberately at unarmed Gazans waiting for humanitarian aid."
The backdrop is an environment in which leaders of both parties for nearly two years have exploited campus protests against Israeli war crimes by weaponizing antisemitism to blunt widespread criticism of U.S. arms sales and other support for Israel's war.
At the same time, many Jews, especially younger ones, strongly supported Mamdani, for both his progressive program to address an affordability crisis in New York City as well as breaking ranks with Israeli apologists.
Hoping to scoring national electoral talking points against all Democrats, GOP politicians predictably rushed to label Mamdani as a "raging antisemite Communist" in the words of Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.). Far-right Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) even called for him to be "subject to denaturalization proceedings" and deported.
Some Democrats also jumped on the fear mongering Islamophobia bandwagon, with several notable leaders failing to endorse the nominee of their own party. New York Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand falsely claimed Mamdani was condoning "global jihad."
What has Mamdani actually said that prompts such panic? He responded to the outbreak of the Gaza war by rightly noting "a just and lasting peace can only begin by ending the occupation and dismantling apartheid" and called for equal rights for all religious and ethnic groups in Israel. Mamdani's most vociferous critics fail to note he has repeatedly and emphatically also condemned antisemitism and branded Hamas' October 7 attacks as "horrific war crimes."
At the same time, many Jews, especially younger ones, strongly supported Mamdani, for both his progressive program to address an affordability crisis in New York City as well as breaking ranks with Israeli apologists like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. As Christi Olson noted on Twitter "Mamdani swept the most Jewish neighborhoods on Earth outside of Israel."
Mamdani's apt depiction of Israel's policy in Gaza as a "genocide"—that has infuriated those unwilling to accept that term—which has been increasingly apparent in recent days. While official death counts of Palestinians in Gaza are at an alarming 56,500 and counting, it has been reported that since the start of the war the population of Gaza has plummeted from 2.2 million to 1.8 million, reinforcing the likelihood that the official death count is a massive undercount.
Israeli Troops "Ordered to Shoot"
Following the collapse of a temporary cease-fire in February, Israel imposed a blockade of food that led to a famine—with the cost of civilian lives, including children. Israel was finally forced by international pressure to begin to allow dribs of aid into Gaza.
But that has been followed by repeated incidents of Israeli troops killing starving people walking long distances to get food at a small handful of aid sites. These are the stations operated by private security contractors (the untested, so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, GHF) working for a U.S. contractor with the oversight of Israeli soldiers that Israel and the U.S. accepted after banning far more experienced United Nations aid relief workers.
At least 410 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military, the U.N. human rights office has reported.
If American readers doubted that Israel was deliberately shooting starving, desperate people, Haaretz lifted the veil.
The death toll is more easily understood with the Haaretz bombshell expose June 27. It opens with a chilling revelation. "Israeli soldiers in Gaza told Haaretz that the army has deliberately fired at Palestinians near aid distribution sites over the past month."
That's quite a contrast with most of the U.S. media silence. When The New York Times finally provided front page coverage June 26, they carefully avoided blaming Israel. The headline read: "The Lethal Risk of Seeking Food in Gaza," as if the hundreds were dying of heat stroke or food poisoning, merely noting the "life-risking endeavor for Palestinians." It took eight paragraphs to get to Israeli troops "opened fire on the approaches to the new aid hubs" which they described merely as "warning shots."
Only farther down did the Times add that "France on Tuesday condemned what it said was Israeli gunfire at civilians gathered around an aid distribution point in Gaza, saying it had left dozens of dead and wounded."
If American readers doubted that Israel was deliberately shooting starving, desperate people, Haaretz lifted the veil.
"Conversations with officers and soldiers reveal that commanders ordered troops to shoot at crowds to drive them away or disperse them, even though it was clear they posed no threat," Haaretz reported.
That was just the opening:
"It's a killing field," one soldier said. "Where I was stationed, between 1 and 5 people were killed every day. They're treated like a hostile force—no crowd-control measures, no tear gas—just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars."
"We open fire early in the morning if someone tries to get in line from a few hundred meters away, and sometimes we just charge at them from close range. But there's no danger to the forces." According to him, "I'm not aware of a single instance of return fire. There's no enemy, no weapons." He also said the activity in his area of service is referred to as Operation Salted Fish—the name of the Israeli version of the children's game "Red light, green light."
Haaretz is a left of center publication that is repeatedly threatened by the Netanyahu government. But it has not been daunted and continues to report what most Americans never read in major U.S. media. And the recent Netanyahu and Trump attacks on Iran have only further hidden the daily death toll.
"IDF officers told Haaretz that the army does not allow the public in Israel or abroad to see footage of what takes place around the food distribution sites. According to them, the army is satisfied that the GHF's operations have prevented a total collapse of international legitimacy for continuing the war. They believe the IDF has managed to turn Gaza into a "backyard," especially since the war with Iran began."
"Gaza doesn't interest anyone anymore," a reservist told Haaretz. "It's become a place with its own set of rules. The loss of human life means nothing."
It means something to Zohran Mamdani, and to far too few other U.S. politicians who have the courage to say it out loud. And it should mean something to the rest of us too, especially as this genocide would not be possible without the weapons, diplomatic cover, and collusion of our own government.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular