After years of sneering, Israeli military says that Hamas-run health ministry's tally of 71,000 war dead in Gaza is accurate

The war in Gaza unfolded amid an incessant argument complete with name-calling over how many Palestinians Israel was killing in its retaliation for the atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023 — specifically about whether the figures could be trusted and who was allowed to cite them without reputational punishment. Last week, the argument collapsed when a senior Israeli military spokesman addressed the press on the matter. The Times of Israel reported:

Briefing reporters on condition of anonymity, the security official said that the IDF believes the Gaza death count from the two-plus-year war, sparked by Hamas’s October 7 onslaught, is around 70,000. The Gaza health ministry’s current death toll is 71,667, including over 450 killed since the October 2025 ceasefire. [...]

Israel largely rejected death tolls claimed by Hamas’s health ministry during the war, especially following specific incidents in which the terror group announced what Israeli officials called “exaggerated tolls.”

The 70,000 figure does not include an estimated 10,000 bodies believed to be still buried under rubble from blasts by bombs, missiles, and artillery.

Israel did not counter the health ministry’s death toll reports with its own figures during the war, instead offering rough ratios of civilian-to-combatants killed and rejecting Palestinian numbers outright. Yet during previous wars Israeli security agencies had found the same Hamas-run ministry’s death counts to be reliable. So did the United Nations, the World Health Organization, U.S. State Department, and a plethora of international human rights organizations. In previous Gaza conflicts, in fact, final tallies recognized by Israeli authorities were broadly consistent with Palestinian data.

But this time around they and other critics attacked the numbers. How could the count of the dead be trusted with the deceitful architects of Oct. 7 in charge of the counters? Inside and outside Israel, officials, media, activists, politicians, and website commenters sneered at the tally, frequently labeling anyone who took the numbers seriously to be gullible or a Hamas sympathizer.

Former President Joe Biden publicly cast doubt on the figures. The phrase “Hamas-run Health Ministry” became a solvent, disappearing inconvenient facts on contact. While accurate at the time — Hamas certainly ran Gaza and with an iron hand — all too often the phrase was deployed not to promote reasonable skepticism regarding a potentially dubious source but to preempt discussion.

In the wake of the IDF admission, on Xitter Beirut-based journalist Séamus Malekafzali said. “How many years did we spend screaming, with checked and re-checked figures, lists showing names and ID numbers, being told the numbers were completely fanciful despite rigorous, transparent verification, and now the IDF quietly accepts that they were correct all along.”

Prominent Israeli academic Ori Goldberg wrote of IDF’s admission, “‘Accepts’ means that even the vast network of lies no longer holds. If the IDF accepts 70,000, it has killed innumerably more.”

The British medical journal The Lancet asserted in June 2024 that the actual death toll in Gaza was much higher then than had been reported. In June 2025, a study published in Nature reported 84,000 war deaths in Gaza. Others say the toll could be even higher, with an analysis by The Economist estimating between 77,000-109,000 Gazans killed by Israeli forces up to June 2024.

At Haaretz, in the wake of the IDF briefing, Nir Hasson wrote in a commentary headlined The IDF Admits It Killed 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza. What Other Accusations Could Turn Out to Be True:

To understand why the Health Ministry's reports are reliable, we must first ask which contradictory information exists. But there are no contradictory reports. The most recent war in Gaza, which began on October 7, 2023, is the first war in Israeli history in which the IDF did not publish any official data on casualties from the opposing side.

The Gaza Health Ministry, meanwhile, published not only the overall death toll, but also compiled a detailed list of the majority of the dead, including their full names, the names of their fathers and grandfathers, dates of birth and identification numbers. [...]

Some scholars believe that the war's overall death toll – including those who died from its effects and those killed and still buried under the rubble – is significantly higher than 70,000. In fact, academic studies from recent months estimate that the war has claimed the lives of over one hundred thousand Palestinians.

The Israeli public must ask itself what the IDF's belated recognition of the Palestinian death toll indicates about the credibility of claims by the army and government regarding other aspects of the fighting in Gaza: from open-fire regulations, to the abuse of Palestinian detainees, looting, the positioning of hospitals and Hamas facilities, and the inordinate destruction.

Gaza is now a battlefield of debris. Meanwhile, ivergent visions of a future Gaza are bandied about by Jared Kushner and hard-right Israeli politicians with annexation on their minds. Extremist West Bank settlers dream their own version of “from the river to the sea,” engaging in violence and theft against their Palestinian neighbors, all as the Israeli government approves dozens of new, internationally illegal settlements. One more step aimed at closing out a future, sovereign Palestinian state. A guarantee that the war in Gaza and its body count won’t be the last.

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