Researchers have found that almost 100,000 Palestinians have been killed since the start of Israel’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip in October 2023.
The figure was published in a new study led by University of London economist Professor Michael Spagat and Palestinian political scientist Khalil Shikaki, who surveyed 2,000 households in the besieged Gaza, comprising almost 10,000 people.
The researchers concluded that, as of January 2025, some 75,200 people died a violent death in Gaza during the Israeli aggression, the vast majority caused by Israeli munitions, along with 8,540 killed via a non-violent death.
Since January, more than 10,000 people have also been reported killed by the Gaza Health Ministry, bringing the combined fatality count to nearly 100,000.
The new death toll shows that the Gaza Health Ministry understates the true scale of the crisis caused by the Israeli aggression, compounded by hunger, disease, and gunfire at food distribution centers.
Spagat said the survey’s data “positions the war in the Gaza Strip as one of the bloodiest conflicts of the 21st century.”
He also noted that the proportion of those killed relative to the population is something like 4 percent, adding, “I’m not sure that there’s another case in the 21st century that’s reached that high.”
Meanwhile, the researchers said that 56 percent of those killed have been either children up to the age of 18 or women.
The proportion of women and children killed via a violent death in the Israeli offensive against the Gaza Strip is more than double the proportion in almost every other recent conflict, they noted.
“That’s an exceptional figure when compared with almost every other conflict since World War II,” the Israeli daily Haaretz reported.
Israel unleashed its brutal Gaza onslaught on October 7, 2023, after the Palestinian Hamas resistance group carried out its historic operation against the occupying entity in retaliation for the regime’s intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people.
The Tel Aviv regime has so far failed to achieve its declared objectives of eliminating Hamas and freeing captives in Gaza, despite killing a shocking number of Palestinians.
The Tel Aviv regime has so far failed to achieve its declared objectives of eliminating Hamas and freeing captives in Gaza, despite killing a shocking number of Palestinians.
bd-pratidin/GR
