The official death toll from Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has surpassed 40,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza health ministry — but with thousands missing under the rubble or dead from disease or starvation, the true death toll is likely far higher.
According to the health ministry, as of Thursday, officials had counted 40,005 killed and 92,401 wounded by Israel. This includes at least 16,456 children killed by Israel’s assault. Experts say the death toll indicates that the genocide ranks among the deadliest conflicts of the 21st century.
On top of that, government officials said on Thursday that another 10,000 people are missing under the rubble, meaning that the death toll may be at least 50,000.
As the UN’s top human rights chief Volker Türk noted, the official death toll represents 130 people killed each day by Israel over the past 10 months. This is a “grim milestone,” Türk said, that is “overwhelmingly due to recurring failures by the Israeli Defense Forces to comply with the rules of war.” The majority of the deaths are of women and children, he noted.
These deaths, representing roughly 2 percent of Gaza’s population, were caused by Israel’s campaign of extermination against Gaza, with Israeli forces having destroyed all systems supporting life in Gaza, including medical and sanitary services, and preventing the vast majority of necessary supplies like food and water from entering the region.
Israel may have killed many thousands more who are not included in the death count. Because officials are only able to count deaths of people whose bodies were retrieved and brought to hospitals, there is an unknowable number of people who have died in places inaccessible to officials.
The genocide will haunt its survivors forever. They have lost friends, family, neighbors — and many, their own children, their newborn babies, their grandchildren.
The range of deaths not counted is anywhere between thousands and hundreds of thousands, experts have said. Last month, a group of U.S. medical professionals who recently returned from missions to Gaza calculated that the death toll is, conservatively, at least 92,000, with over 37,000 deaths likely to have occurred from starvation, and thousands others from disease.
Also last month, public health researchers noted in an editorial for The Lancet that so-called indirect deaths that are not being counted by officials could range between 3 and 15 times the number of direct deaths accounted for in the official toll. With indirect deaths, or those caused by factors like the lack of medical infrastructure or Israel’s famine campaign, the official death toll could be 186,000 or more, the researchers said.
It could also be possible that the true number of those missing under the rubble and likely dead is far higher than estimated. Humanitarian groups have been estimating that over 10,000 people are missing for months now, as Israel has continued its bombings and has now destroyed or bombed nearly two-thirds of all buildings in Gaza.
Aid groups and human rights experts said that even the official death toll is proof that Israel is committing grave war crimes in Gaza.
“The moral abyss in which [Israel has] fallen is hard to comprehend,” UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese told Al Jazeera.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.