the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Oct 27, 2025
According to the latest estimates provided by Hamas’s Ministry of Health, Israeli forces have killed over 68,000 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded another 170,000. These figures have been found valid by the United Nations and other international entities.
Yet the true death toll is likely considerably higher.
One recent study was carried out under the direction of Michael Spagat of Royal Holloway University of London. He and his team actually conducted a “household” survey among Palestinians in Gaza around the beginning of 2025. They drew a random sample of people, most of whom were living in built-up shelters and tent gatherings, and conducted “door-to-door” interviews with them under extremely difficult conditions.
Despite the vast number of Palestinians who were displaced by the war, Spagat’s team was able in this way to get better estimates of the true death toll than has been possible in conflicts in other parts of the world, where the population is more dispersed.
They estimate the true death toll to be about 35% higher than what Hamas reports. That would make the current total closer to 92,000. Spagat’s team estimated that 56%, or more than 51,000 of the dead, were women, children and the elderly.
It may be hard to ever know the true death toll for sure, given the difficulty of finding all of the dead bodies buried in the rubble of the buildings destroyed by Israel’s bombings. But this research makes it clear it’s even higher than we’ve been led to believe to date.