A newly released academic study estimates that around 75,000 people in Gaza have died violently since the war began on 7 October 2023 – a figure nearly 40 per cent higher than the official toll reported by Gaza’s Ministry of Health. The research, based on household surveys conducted inside the Strip between December 2024 and January 2025, also identifies nearly 9,000 additional nonviolent deaths, making it the most comprehensive mortality estimate to date in the conflict.
The survey was carried out by a research team led by Professor Michael Spagat of Royal Holloway, University of London (and former Chair of Action on Armed Violence), and Professor Debarati Guha-Sapir of the Catholic University of Louvain.
It involved face-to-face interviews with 2,000 randomly selected households across Gaza’s five governorates. Participants were asked to list household members present before the war and their current status – providing an on-the-ground snapshot of mortality through direct testimony.
The study’s findings stand out:
- Estimated violent deaths: 75,200 (95% confidence interval: 63,600 to 86,800)
- Nonviolent deaths above baseline (“excess deaths”): 8,540
- Total nonviolent deaths: 16,300
- Women, children and elderly made up 56.2% of violent deaths
By comparison, Gaza’s Ministry of Health had reported 45,650 violent deaths during the same period (as of June 29th, 2025 the figure stands far higher at at least 56,000 people).
The 45,650 figure is well below the survey’s lower confidence threshold. It also reflects previous work by AOAV that suggests that the Ministry of Health’s data may be conservatively-reporting child deaths.
While the researchers were unable to reach some parts of Gaza due to ongoing bombardments and Israeli evacuation orders, they believe this limitation, if anything, means their figures are likely conservative.
Crucially, this is the first study to quantify the indirect death toll in Gaza – deaths from treatable illness, injury, or deprivation caused by the breakdown of healthcare, sanitation and food systems.
The results challenge not only the official death toll but also raise questions for international actors relying on narrow definitions of war casualties. The demographic profile recorded in the survey – where women, children, and the elderly account for more than half of violent deaths – mirrors that of the Gaza Ministry of Health, suggesting their statistics may be more accurate in composition than in scale.
Earlier estimates of indirect deaths, including one letter to The Lancet suggesting a four-to-one ratio of indirect to direct deaths, were widely criticised as speculative. The new study offers a firmer statistical basis, while cautioning that indirect deaths could escalate significantly if the conflict and blockade continue.
Francesco Checchi of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, whose team published a separate mortality estimate in February, welcomed the findings, telling the New Scientist that the new data “present a more complete picture of mortality.”
While he disputed that household surveys were necessarily more accurate than his own methodology – which relied on online data and social media obituaries – he acknowledged that this latest study, due to its fieldwork, was “more up to date and inclusive of indirect deaths.”
The results arrive at a time when scrutiny of Israeli military conduct in Gaza is growing. Civilian infrastructure has been devastated, access to healthcare is severely restricted, and famine looms. Yet debate continues among Western governments over the legality and proportionality of Israel’s actions – often without independent data to inform those assessments.
Action on Armed Violence (AOAV), which has tracked explosive violence globally for over a decade, believes this study serves a powerful reminder of the full spectrum of harm caused by war.
“These numbers should shock the conscience,” said AOAV Executive Director Iain Overton. “They tell us that the cost of war in Gaza is not just in those who are counted in morgues, but in the lives lost silently: to hunger, untreated wounds, and collapsing hospitals. The failure to record those deaths does not make them less real.”
The study has been published as a preprint on medRxiv and awaits peer review.
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