Since October 7, 2023, Israeli officials, Western politicians, and media commentators have repeatedly cast doubt on the Palestinian death toll coming out of Gaza. The figures are inflated, they suggest. They come from Hamas. They cannot be trusted. This scepticism has served a function: if the numbers are unreliable, the scale of what is happening can be held at arm’s length.
The evidence does not support that scepticism. What the evidence shows instead is a casualty recording system that is, under conditions of extraordinary destruction, doing something without precedent in modern conflict — naming the dead, one by one, with ID numbers attached.
This article examines how Gaza’s Ministry of Health counts its dead, what independent researchers have found when they tested those counts, where the system’s limits genuinely lie, and what the gap between the documented figure and the full death toll actually means.
The Unprecedented Act of Naming
From the opening days of Israel’s military campaign, the Palestinian Ministry of Health (MoH) in Gaza began releasing, in Arabic, the names of those it recorded as killed — along with their national ID numbers, ages, and sex. Airwars, the civilian harm monitoring organisation that has compiled and published these lists in searchable form, describes this as “unprecedented in modern conflict, with no such official individualised record of harm in Ukraine, Iraq, or Syria publicly available.”
By August 2024, the MoH had fully identified more than 30,000 individuals killed. Every Casualty Counts
The national ID numbers are not MoH-issued identifiers. They are assigned by the Israeli authorities, who maintain the Gazan population registry. Every Casualty Counts This is a detail that those who accuse the MoH of fabrication rarely reckon with: the registry against which these IDs can be checked is held by the same government disputing the figures.
Professor Mike Spagat, chair of Every Casualty Counts and a specialist in conflict casualty data at Royal Holloway, University of London, has noted that the initial system was “simple and transparent,” based on recording bodies as they passed through the hospital morgue system. For each person, the MoH recorded name, age, sex, and national ID. Every Casualty Counts
Testing the Count: What Independent Verification Found
The integrity of the MoH’s initial figures was put to a rigorous test by Airwars, published in July 2024. Over nine months, Airwars researchers independently documented the deaths of civilians killed in Gaza using open-source monitoring — social media, local news, NGO reporting, obituaries posted by family members on Facebook, names written on body bags, and lists held up by grieving relatives to news cameras. Airwars
From the first seventeen days of the war alone — October 7 to October 24, 2023 — Airwars identified nearly 3,000 full names of civilian victims killed. Researchers then cross-checked those names against the MoH’s first list, released October 26. Airwars
The result: 75 percent of the names Airwars had independently found also appeared on the MoH list.
Of 2,993 individuals with full names in the Airwars archive, 2,236 were matched to the first MoH list — a reconciliation rate of 74.71 percent. Airwars
Spagat, who described the investigation as “painstaking,” said the findings “provide strong validation for both the first Ministry of Health list of the dead and the reliability of social media posts from Palestinians.” He added: “Neither list is complete but the 75% matching rate demonstrates convincingly that both capture a large fraction of the underlying reality.” Airwars
A second, independent quality check used data on Gaza-based UN workers killed in the war. Public health researchers found that the fraction of UN workers killed during the period covered by the October 26 MoH list is close to the number of people on that list divided by the total population of Gaza — a further compatibility test that added credibility to the figures. Every Casualty Counts
Israeli officials have repeatedly disputed the MoH figures. Airwars’ own assessment is that “most analyses, including by Airwars, have found the MoH lists to be broadly reliable.” Some researchers identified instances where sex may have been misrecorded. But “large scale analysis found that such instances likely resulted from error rather than intentional manipulation.” Airwars
How the System Works — and How It Broke Down
The initial methodology was straightforward. A Patient Services employee would enter details of each death into a local computer terminal networked into the MoH’s central database. During this process, staff could retrieve missing information from Gaza’s population registry — confirming name, ID number, age, and sex. Every Casualty Counts
That system collapsed on November 10, 2023, when Israeli forces took over Al-Shifa Medical Complex. Both the main and alternative data centres at Al-Rantisi Complex were destroyed. With no access to the civil registry or the central death registry, hospital staff could no longer individually identify the dead as they arrived. Every Casualty Counts
In a statement to Airwars, the MoH itself explained the consequences directly: “the collapse of the information system during the Israeli occupation army’s attack on Al-Shifa Medical Complex and the destruction of the main data centre, and also the attack on Al-Rantisi Hospital and the destruction of the alternative data centre.” Staff also noted that some days up to 1,000 people had died, making full identification of each body impossible. Airwars
Five of the eight hospitals that were initially providing data on Palestinian fatalities had stopped doing so due to the war by mid-2024. Airwars
To compensate, the MoH deployed public relations and media staff to conduct headcounts of bodies arriving at hospitals that remained partially functional. The MoH’s communications had described this as recording deaths from “reliable media sources” — a phrase that was widely misread as referring to news monitoring. The Director of the MoH’s Health Information Centre, Zaher Al Wahaidi, clarified in August 2024 that this interpretation was incorrect: the phrase referred to the hospital PR and media staff conducting the headcounts, not to journalistic sources. The MoH never gathered casualty information via media monitoring. Every Casualty Counts
A parallel channel was also opened: Gazans could fill in a public form to report deaths. A completed form triggers a judicial verification process; if successful, it yields a death certificate and an entry on the detailed lists. Every Casualty Counts
The MoH has driven the number of unidentified deaths down considerably through these processes — from 15,070 on March 31, 2024, to 7,200 on August 6, 2024. Every Casualty Counts
What the Gap Between Lists and Totals Means
A consistent source of confusion — and of bad-faith criticism — has been the gap between the MoH’s periodically released named lists and the higher total death figures announced daily.
List 4, for example, contained 24,653 documented deaths for the period October 7 to April 30, 2024. The official MoH total for the same period was 34,535. Every Casualty Counts
Spagat describes the 24,653 figure as “a reliable rock-bottom minimum as of April 30.” The roughly 10,000 additional deaths he characterises as “very poorly documented although I do find this figure plausible.” Every Casualty Counts
These additional deaths are not fabrications. They are headcounts — bodies arriving at hospitals and counted by staff who, under bombardment, without access to registries, with data infrastructure destroyed, could not complete individual identification records in real time. The MoH is working through the backlog, converting those headcounts into documented deaths using hand-written records and the judicial form system. Every Casualty Counts
The named lists are not the ceiling of the death toll. They are the floor — the minimum number of people whose deaths have been individually documented and verified. The gap does not indicate inflation. It indicates a functioning bureaucracy operating inside a catastrophe.
One important distinction that Every Casualty Counts makes clearly: the MoH’s official death tolls include only violent, conflict-related deaths. Non-violent deaths — those caused by disease, the collapse of healthcare, malnutrition, the destruction of water and sanitation infrastructure — are not included in the headline figures. Every Casualty Counts
The Scale the Numbers Describe
The MoH figures do not exist in isolation. They are corroborated by independent documentation of the intensity of harm being recorded.
Airwars has published 606 incidents of civilian harm from the first 25 days of the war alone, finding a minimum of 5,139 civilians killed in that period. This is, in Airwars’ own analysis, “nearly four times more civilians reported killed in a single month than in any conflict Airwars has documented since it was established in 2014.” Airwars
In those same 25 days, Airwars documented at least 65 incidents in which a minimum of 20 civilians were killed in a single incident — nearly triple the number of such high-fatality incidents documented within any comparable timeframe previously. Airwars
The minimum number of children killed in October 2023 alone — at least 1,900 — is nearly seven times higher than the most deadly month for children previously documented by Airwars across any conflict zone. In even the deadliest year for children in Syria, 2016, Airwars recorded at least 1,926 children killed by foreign actors over twelve months. Gaza exceeded that in 25 days. Airwars
In more than 95 percent of all cases where a woman was killed, at least one child was also killed. More than nine out of ten women and children were killed in residential buildings. On average, when civilians were killed alongside family members, at least 15 family members were killed — higher than any other conflict Airwars has documented. Airwars
These are not figures produced by the MoH. They come from Airwars’ own incident-based methodology, drawn from open sources, cross-checked against multiple documentation streams. They describe the same reality the MoH figures describe.
The Question of Combatants
A persistent line of attack on MoH data is that it conflates militants and civilians. This is accurate — the MoH does not distinguish between them. But Zaher Al Wahaidi explained the reason directly: “the MoH records everyone who comes to it without knowing whether they are civilians or fighters, as all come in civilian clothes.” Every Casualty Counts
Every Casualty Counts holds a clear position on this: “It would not be appropriate for MoH employees to attempt to make such distinctions, as they are not qualified to do so. Determining combatant status is a complex matter of international humanitarian law which must be undertaken by legal and military experts.” Every Casualty Counts
Independent analysis from Airwars, which does attempt to determine civilian status using open-source evidence, found in the first weeks of the conflict that the demographic composition of the dead in the MoH data looked “almost like a random draw from the population” — the killing was, by any analytical measure, indiscriminate. Every Casualty Counts
The Israeli authorities, for their part, have released numbers of fighters they claim to have killed. But, as Spagat notes, they have not provided any detailed data or explained where those numbers come from — placing Israeli military casualty claims, by the same methodological standard, in the same category as the least-verified component of the MoH data. Every Casualty Counts
What Disputing the Numbers Actually Does
The challenge to the MoH figures has never been primarily methodological. It has been political. Israeli officials, and the Western governments that have continued to supply arms and diplomatic cover throughout the campaign, have an interest in keeping the human cost of that campaign from settling too heavily in public consciousness.
What the accumulated body of evidence shows is something straightforward: the Palestinian Ministry of Health, operating under bombardment, with its data infrastructure deliberately destroyed, with staff killed and displaced, has produced what Spagat calls “a serious and transparent casualty recording effort” — one that is “broadly reliable” in the assessment of the organisations that have tested it. Every Casualty Counts
The named lists Airwars has compiled and published — individuals with names, ID numbers, ages — represent something unprecedented in modern conflict. There is no comparable public record from Ukraine, Iraq, or Syria. Airwars Each entry is a person. Each number in the headline figure corresponds to a life recorded, however imperfectly, in a bureaucracy straining to bear witness under conditions designed to make witness-bearing impossible.
South Africa brought a case of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice in January 2024, with the scale of killing in Gaza at the centre of its submission. Airwars The credibility of those numbers matters to that case. It also matters to the historical record — to the question of what was knowable, and when, and by whom.
The numbers are credible. The killing they describe is documented. What happens with that knowledge is a political question, not a methodological one.
Sources:
- Airwars — “List of identified victims, as published by the Palestinian MoH in Gaza”
- Airwars — “One Name, Two Lists: Open Source Verification of Gaza Death Tolls”
- Airwars — “Patterns of Harm Analysis: Gaza, October 2023”
- Every Casualty Counts — “Opening the Black Box: Fresh Insights into the Casualty Recording System of the Gaza Ministry of Health”
- Every Casualty Counts — “The Breakdown of Casualty Recording in Gaza since October 2023”
Palestinian writer and researcher documenting life under occupation, drawing on primary sources from B’Tselem, Al-Haq, OCHA oPt, Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, and named scholars.