Gaza City's central Zeitoun neighborhood, bombed by the Israeli army, on February 6, 2026. JEHAD ALSHRAFI/AP
Though it has often been accused of exaggerating the death toll of Israeli military operations in the Gaza Strip, conducted over two years in retaliation for the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, before international organizations later corroborated its figures, the Gaza Ministry of Health (MoH), which is controlled by Hamas, actually omitted a significant portion of the total human deaths in the Palestinian enclave in its reports. Due to the prevailing chaos there, difficulties in recovering and identifying bodies from the rubble, and a lack of official death declarations when entire families were killed, a substantial share of deaths went unrecorded by the local administration.
That is the conclusion of the first Gaza field study conducted independently of the territory's authorities, published on Wednesday, February 18, in the journal The Lancet Global Health. The study estimates that deaths in Gaza went underreported by about 35%, with this factor rising to 40% when including non-violent deaths (from illness, malnutrition, etc.) indirectly caused by the war. These findings confirm those of previous analyses published in the scientific literature.
