Independent Research Points To Over 75,000 Deaths In Gaza Conflict

• The number of casualties stands nearly 35 per cent higher than the 49,090 violent deaths reported by Gaza’s Ministry of Health (MoH) over the same period

The true scale of devastation in Gaza is coming into sharper focus, and it is far more alarming than early official tallies suggested. A series of major scientific studies published in leading medical journals now estimate that by early 2025, more than 75,000 people had died violent deaths — a figure that reshapes public understanding of the war’s human toll and transforms abstract statistics into an immense ledger of lives lost.

At the center of this reassessment is the Gaza Mortality Survey (GMS), published in The Lancet Global Health. Drawing on interviews with 2,000 households representing 9,729 individuals across the territory, researchers calculated an estimated 75,200 violent deaths between October 7, 2023 and January 5, 2025. That figure represents approximately 3.4 percent of Gaza’s pre-war population of 2.2 million people. It is nearly 35 percent higher than the 49,090 violent deaths reported over the same period by Gaza’s Ministry of Health.

Rather than dismissing official Palestinian figures, however, the researchers argue that their findings reinforce them. They describe the Ministry of Health’s administrative records not as inflated, but as incomplete — constrained by the destruction of the very systems tasked with documenting fatalities. Michael Spagat, lead author of the study and a professor at Royal Holloway University of London, concluded that “the ministry’s reporting remains broadly reliable, even under conditions of systemic devastation.” In this framing, official tallies represent a “conservative floor” rather than an exaggeration.

The GMS builds upon earlier work published in The Lancet in January 2025, which used capture-recapture statistical modeling to estimate 64,260 deaths during the war’s first nine months. That earlier study relied primarily on mathematical inference. The new survey moves beyond modeling to empirical household testimony, extending the timeline into 2025 and offering a more comprehensive picture of mortality patterns.

Crucially, the GMS also quantified non-violent excess deaths — those resulting not from bombs or bullets but from the collapse of basic living conditions. Researchers identified 16,300 non-violent deaths during the study period, including 8,540 excess fatalities directly linked to the breakdown of healthcare services, sanitation, and access to food and medicine. Commentators writing in The Lancet Global Health described what they called a “central paradox” of modern conflict: “The more thoroughly a health system is shattered, the harder it becomes to measure the human cost of its destruction.”

This paradox underscores the methodological challenges of counting the dead in a landscape where hospitals have been damaged or destroyed, civil registries disrupted, and families displaced. As infrastructure collapses, documentation falters — and mortality risks becoming invisible even as it accelerates.

Even within Israeli official circles, acknowledgment of higher casualty figures has reportedly surfaced. In private briefings, some Israeli military officials have estimated that approximately 70,000 people may have been killed — a figure that tacitly converges with independent academic estimates. The demographic profile of those killed is striking: women, children, and the elderly account for 56.2 percent of the dead, closely mirroring Palestinian Ministry of Health data and challenging claims of systematic inflation.

Yet death statistics capture only one dimension of the crisis. Survivors face an immense and enduring burden of injury. A predictive multi-source model published in eClinicalMedicine estimated 116,020 cumulative injuries by April 30, 2025. Between 29,000 and 46,000 of those injuries are believed to require complex reconstructive surgery — an extraordinary backlog in a territory that, prior to the war, had just eight board-certified plastic and reconstructive surgeons.

Ash Patel, co-author of the injury study, warned that “even if Gaza’s surgical capacity were miraculously restored to pre-war levels, it would take a decade to address the accumulated cases.” He noted that “more than 80 percent of injuries stem from explosions — air strikes and shelling in densely packed urban neighbourhoods — leaving behind shattered limbs, severe burns, and blast trauma that demand specialised expertise now largely absent.”

By May 2025, only 12 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals remained capable of delivering care beyond emergency triage. Hospital bed capacity had fallen from more than 3,000 beds before the war to roughly 2,000 for the entire population. Advanced capabilities such as microsurgery have been largely extinguished. Researchers describe the destruction of medical infrastructure as systematic, and the consequences profound.

Incendiary weapons have compounded the devastation, producing severe burns often intertwined with fractures and extensive tissue loss. For many patients, delayed or interrupted treatment has resulted in infections, sepsis, renal failure, and permanent disability. In The Lancet Global Health, Belal Aldabbour and Bilal Irfan describe what they call a “growing ‘grey zone’ in mortality,” where deaths occur months after an initial injury. “There is a growing grey zone in mortality — where deaths from sepsis months after a blast, or from untreated chronic injury amid water scarcity, blur the line between direct and indirect violence,” they wrote.

Such delayed deaths complicate conventional accounting. They raise difficult questions about how to categorize mortality in environments where malnutrition, water scarcity, and collapsed medical systems intertwine with battlefield trauma.

Conditions have deteriorated further since the survey’s data collection ended. By late 2025, forced evacuations reportedly encompassed more than 80 percent of Gaza’s territory. Northern Gaza and Rafah experienced extensive destruction, and famine was declared in the north in August 2025. Malnutrition has compounded existing injuries and weakened immune systems, diminishing survivors’ capacity to recover.

Taken together, these independent studies form a grim mosaic of loss: tens of thousands dead, more than a hundred thousand injured, and a healthcare system reduced to fragments. Researchers warn that without an immediate cessation of hostilities and a massive international expansion of medical support, the crisis will deepen. The backlog of reconstructive need alone, they caution, could shape public health outcomes for decades.

In the end, the figures are not mere abstractions. They represent families fractured, communities erased, and futures deferred. As rubble continues to settle, the scientific record stands as both testimony and warning — an effort to document, with precision and care, the human consequences of sustained devastation.