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.
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