Casualties of the Gaza war

[56] Euro-Med Monitor reported that the IDF was taking and holding Palestinian bodies from Gaza, prompting calls for an international investigation on organ theft suspicions.

[57] The organization further stated that Israel had systematically killed hundreds of tech specialists, including "programmers, information technology experts, and computer engineering analysts".

[58] In March 2024, Al Jazeera English's news blog reported that Israeli forces conducted a pattern of killing entire families by targeting the homes they were sheltering in.

[66] In November, a report on an investigation by the UN Human Rights Office into a subset of 8,119 verified fatalities found around 70% of them to be women and children, with 5-9 year olds the most heavily represented group.

[69] In a statement, UNICEF regional director Adele Khodr stated Gaza's child death toll was a "growing stain on our collective conscience".

[64][78] A joint report by Oxfam and Action on Armed Violence in October 2024 found the Israeli military had killed more women and children in Gaza than in any other conflict around the world in the past two decades.

[97] The number of casualties is higher than in any conflict in Gaza's recent history, with Neta Crawford of the Costs of War Project at Brown University stating, "This is, in the 21st century, a significant and out-of-the-norm level of destruction".

[113] On 13 October, the Palestinian Ministry of Health noted 20 surnames had been removed from Gaza's civil registry, meaning every single person in that entire family had been killed.

It is the “highest number of people facing catastrophic hunger” ever recorded on the IPC scale,[130] and is widely expected to be the most intense man-made famine since the Second World War.

[135] By October 2024, the IPC and World Food Programme reported that more than 1.8 million Palestinians in Gaza were experiencing “extremely critical” levels of hunger, resulting from 70% of crop fields destroyed and livelihoods decimated during Israel's offensive.

[142] Matthew Miller made a similar claim to Biden's, despite the fact that the US Department of State cites the Gaza Health Ministry's death tolls in its own internal reports.

[159][160] On June 25 Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor estimated 51,000 extra natural (non-casualty) deaths have resulted from the blockade and from the collapse of the health system.

On 9 October, Saeed al-Taweel, editor-in-chief of Al-Khamsa News website, Mohammed Subh and Hisham Alnwajha were killed by an airstrike while filming an anticipated attack in Gaza City.

[166] On 30 October, Al Jazeera correspondent Youmna El-Sayed received a threat from Israeli forces, leading the spokesperson for the UN-Secretary General to remark on the "immense courage" of journalists in Gaza.

[203] According to The New York Times, "The buried make up a shadow death toll in Gaza, a leaden asterisk to the health ministry's official tally of more than 31,000 dead".

[207] Saadi Hassan Sulieman Baraka, a 64-year-old undertaker in Deir el-Balah, told Al Jazeera English in February 2024 that he had personally buried 17,000 people since October 2023.

[2] Initially, Israel had reported 1,400 deaths from the attacks, but on November 10 it revised its casualty count to 1,200 after realizing that bodies that were so badly burnt[216] were not Israeli but rather those of Hamas fighters.

[240] The Druze deputy commander of the 300th "Baram" Regional Brigade, Lieutenant Colonel Alim Abdallah, was killed in action along with two other soldiers while responding to an infiltration from southern Lebanon on 9 October.

[254] On 29 October, 30 Israeli human rights organizations addressed settler violence in the West Bank, asking the international community to "act urgently" to end it.

The Nepali ambassador to Israel, Kanta Rijal, said at least seven of its nationals in the country were injured in the attack, and that they along with ten others were held captive by Hamas at Kibbutz Alumim.

[333][334] A German-Israeli national, Shani Louk, was killed while attending the Re'im music festival; a video of Palestinians parading her near-naked body in a car was circulated on the internet.

[357] Civilians believed to be held captive in Gaza include families, children, festival-goers, peace activists, caregivers, and elders such as 75-year-old historian Alex Dancyg, who has written books on Poland's Jewish community and the Holocaust, was taken from Nir Oz.

[362] [363] According to a report sent to the International Committee of the Red Cross by the Geneva-based organization Hostage and Missing Families Forum, hostages include people with Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, dementia, autism and psychiatric disorders, who are "in urgent need of treatment and lifesaving medication", and are "prone to immediate mortality [without] essential medications and treatment."

[366] American-Israeli author Robby Berman set up a fund offering a reward of 1 million Israeli shekels for the release of hostages in Gaza, specifically aimed at encouraging Palestinians to aid in the rescue of Jewish prisoners.

One prisoner reported; “They broke us and beat us with batons and metal sticks... they humiliated us... they have made us starve without food or water,” whilst another claimed "some people died on the way here because they were beaten and subjected to electric shocks."

[374] Marwan Bishara, the senior political analyst at Al Jazeera English, argued that Israel's military campaign aimed to "eliminate anything that walks or breathes in Gaza".

[375] Hani Mahmoud, a journalist on the ground in Gaza, wrote, "It's difficult to imagine that the Israeli military has any clear objective other than the mass murder of civilians inside their homes.

[378] UN rights chief Volker Türk stated, "This unimaginable situation is overwhelmingly due to recurring failures by the Israeli Defense Forces to comply with the rules of war".

If you add those who are likely to die of malnutrition or as a result of wounds inflicted by Israeli bombardments in the weeks and months to come, because of the risks of superinfection and because their pathology will be treated late, then yes, the figure of 186,000 deaths mentioned in The Lancet is credible.

It also noted that its findings "underestimate the full impact of the military operation in Gaza, as they do not account for non-trauma-related deaths resulting from health service disruption, food insecurity, and inadequate water and sanitation.