A recent paper, “Traumatic injury mortality in the Gaza Strip” in the Lancet, a top medical journal, estimates that 64,260 Palestinians were killed by traumatic injury from October 7, 2023 to June 30, 2024. That’s considerably more than the 37,877 figure cited by the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health for the same period.
I believe the authors’ claim could be true. With the infrastructure breakdown, mass displacement and confusion in Gaza, counting fatalities and assigning causes of deaths with any precision is impossible. Moreover, I believe the figure matters. The war seems likely to end in a negotiated settlement, and Israel has to weigh the costs of continuing the war—with civilian deaths a major one—against the goals of freeing hostages and degrading the capability for Hamas to rebuild and reattack. If the war is killing 70% more people than Hamas claims, that is a reason to accept somewhat less favorable settlement terms than otherwise. The higher figure also would suggest the ratio of civilian to combatant fatalities is higher than the 1:1 figure implied by Israeli military information, although it would still be far less than any historical urban conflict.
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