Israel-Hamas war: How many people have died in Gaza?

Published

2 years ago

November 3, 2023

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Mass casualty airstrikes in Gaza have captured headlines around the world, but doubt has been cast on the reliability of fatality figures in the warzone.

Confusion is common in the immediate aftermath of attacks in any conflict, but even Gaza’s official count of the number killed, based on hospital administrative data, has come under scrutiny.

Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry says 9,061 people have been killed since 7 October, two-thirds of them women and children.

Last week, an Israeli military spokesman said the ministry “continuously inflates the number of civilian casualties”. That concern was echoed by US President Joe Biden, who said he has “no confidence” in the figures.

Israel’s fatality figures have not attracted the same scepticism. The Israeli military says that “over 1,400” people were killed by Hamas on 7 October, with police estimating that 1,033 were civilians. A further 20 Israeli soldiers have been killed during ground operations in Gaza, according to the Associated Press.

Whereas journalists and UN investigators have been able to visit the Israeli villages attacked by Hamas to corroborate the figures, Israel has not allowed observers to enter Gaza since the war began.

Analysts say that even for Gazan journalists, periodic phone and internet outages, widespread fuel shortages and the risk of airstrikes have hindered movement within the territory.

“Another challenge is the intensity of the bombardment,” says Emily Tripp, director of Airwars, an organisation specialising in the verification of air strike casualties.

“If the war stops tomorrow, it’ll probably take us another three or four months just to really go through everything properly.”

Satellite imagery shows graveyards expanding

Social media videos and satellite imagery have become crucial resources in allowing outside observers to verify individual incidents, as well as to show the scale of the killing.

Footage posted online, for instance, shows the rapid expansion of cemeteries in Gaza, where dozens of new, makeshift graves have been dug.

Sky News was able to locate this video, uploaded to Snapchat on 19 October, to a cemetery on the outskirts of Gaza City.

“This is Al-Batish cemetery, these graves are all new,” the person capturing the video says.

“People are leaving their dead ones here. May God forgive the martyrs.”

Satellite imagery of the cemetery, taken on the same day, shows a bulldozer digging new graves.

In central Gaza, the Deir al-Balah cemetery has also started to expand.

A worker at the cemetery, Diaa Aqel, said: “[On 9 October] more than 500 martyrs were buried in the cemetery, and we opened the old graves there. […] There was no room left at all.”

Satellite imagery obtained by Sky News shows how the cemetery has undergone a significant expansion.

Sky News has identified the newly-cleared land as the location of mass graves. The video below shows the burial of 33 people, including 15 members of one family, in this part of the cemetery on 23 October.

The footage below, taken at the same site six days later, shows dozens of breeze blocks being used as makeshift headstones.

In a statement on Telegram on 21 October, Gaza’s ministry of religious affairs authorised the digging of mass graves for those killed during the bombings. Authorities say that each governorate has at least two mass graves, some holding over 100 people.

The scale of the conflict and the difficulty of obtaining on-the-ground documentation means that open-source verification can, for now, only provide a partial view of the war’s impact.

“There’s nothing that would lead us to distrust the numbers”

In the meantime, outside observers are likely to continue relying on Gaza’s ministry of health for an overall picture of the number of fatalities.

“The ministry of health in Gaza has historically been fairly reliable,” Tripp says.

“They know the number of people in hospitals, they’ve got the infrastructure, they’ve got the data.”

In recent Gaza wars, figures published by the ministry of health during the fighting have ended up being broadly in line with those later produced by the UN and Israel Defence Forces.

In response to the questions raised about the reliability of their statistics, the ministry recently published the names and ages of all 6,474 victims who had been identified.

In a recent investigation into an airstrike in Gaza City, Airwars verified the death of surgeon Dr Medhat Saidam and 23 of his family members.

“We were able to find pretty much every one of those names in the ministry of health database,” Tripp says.

Dr Saidam had just returned home after a seven-day shift at his hospital when the strike hit. Among those killed were his mother and his brother’s three young children, aged 6, 9 and 11.

“I can say from that case, that what we’re seeing is that the open-source information at least corresponds to what the ministry of health is documenting,” says Tripp.

Brian Root, a senior quantitative analyst at Human Rights Watch, says the ministry’s figures have “always been comparable” to his own findings.

“There’s nothing that would lead us to distrust the numbers.”

Figures released by the health ministry came under particular scrutiny following a blast at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital on 17 October. Initial reports suggested that more than 500 people had been killed.

The ministry later said that 471 people had been killed, while US intelligence agencies assessed the true number of fatalities to be on the low end of 100 to 300 people.

“There’s a big difference between a rapid estimate versus the numbers that come out of administrative data and are compiled over time through hospitals and morgues,” Mr Root says.

“When a number comes out quickly on social media or something like that, that is not something that we immediately take as factual.”

The real number could be higher

Mr Root told Sky News that the numbers reported by the ministry seemed plausible given Gaza’s high population density and the scale of destruction visible in satellite imagery.

Sky News has also looked at the number of deaths among UN staff, which Mr Root says serves as a “good gut check” on the figures.

The UN says that 70 of its staff in Gaza have been killed, approximately 0.56% of the total.

That’s slightly higher than the death rate for all Gaza residents reported by the ministry of health, which stands at 0.41%.

Root said that it is not a perfect comparison, but that it corroborates the scale of deaths reported by the ministry of health.

“In fact, as people go through damaged buildings, we can expect maybe those numbers will increase,” he added.

“They might actually be higher than the numbers that are currently coming out.”

The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.

World

Drones and salami: How Putin is testing the West with Poland airspace violation

Published

6 hours ago

September 10, 2025

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Drones and salami: How Putin is testing the West with Poland airspace violation

The unprecedented Russian drone attacks on Poland are both a test and a warning. How Europe and NATO respond could be crucial to security on this continent.

The Russians are past masters at what’s called “salami slicing”. Tactics that use a series of smaller actions to produce a much bigger outcome that otherwise would have been far more provocative.

The Kremlin is probing the West with gradual but steady escalation. A British Council building and an EU installation are bombed in Kyiv; a senior EU official’s plane’s GPS is jammed.

On their own each provocation produces nothing more than rhetoric from the West – but new lines are crossed and Russia is emboldened.

Ukraine war latest: NATO chief sends message to Putin

Putin is good at this.

He used salami slicing tactics masterfully in 2014 with his “little green men” invasion of Crimea, a range of ambiguous military and diplomatic tactics to take control. The West’s confused delay in responding sealed Crimea’s fate.

He has just taken a larger slice of salami with his drone attacks on Poland.

They are of course a test of NATO’s readiness to deploy its Article 5 obligations. Russia has attacked a member state, allies believe deliberately.

Will NATO trigger the all for one, one for all mechanism in Poland’s defence and attack Russia? Not very likely.

But failing to respond projects weakness. Putin will see the results of his test and plot the next one.

Expect lots of talk of sanctions but remember they failed to avert this invasion and have failed to persuade Russia to reverse it. The only sanctions likely to bite are the ones the US president refuses to approve, on Russia’s oil trade.

So how are the drones also a warning? Well, they pose a question.

Vladimir Putin is asking the West if it really wants to become more involved in this conflict with its own forces. Europeans are considering putting boots on the ground inside Ukraine after any potential ceasefire.

If this latest attack is awkward and complicated and hard to respond to now, what happens if Russia uses hybrid tactics then?

Deniable, ambiguous methods that the Russians excel in could make life very difficult for the alliance if it is embroiled in Ukraine.

Think twice before committing your troops there, Russia is warning the West.

There is more Europe could do.

It could stop buying Russian energy, which it is still astonishingly importing – more than 20 billion euros a year at the last count.

It could use its massive economic advantage (20 times that of Russia’s, and that was before the war) to do more to fund Ukraine’s defence.

While it continues to do neither, expect more excruciating slices of the salami to come.

World

Riot police clash with ‘Block Everything’ protesters in Paris

Published

11 hours ago

September 10, 2025

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Riot police clash with 'Block Everything' protesters in Paris

Riot police have clashed with protesters in Paris after they took to the streets in response to calls to ‘Block Everything’ over discontent with the French government.

Tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets of the French capital and other cities, including Marseille and Montpellier, in response to the online ‘Bloquons Tout’ campaign, which is urging people to strike, block roads, and other public services.

The government has deployed more than 80,000 officers to respond to the unrest, which has seen 200 arrested nationwide so far, according to police, and comes on the same day the new prime minister is being sworn in.

Demonstrators were seen rolling bins into the middle of roads to stop cars, while police rushed to remove the makeshift blockades as quickly as possible.

Tear gas was used by police outside Paris‘s Gare du Nord train station, where around 1,000 gathered, clutching signs declaring Wednesday a public holiday.

Others in the city blocked the entrance to a high school where firefighters were forced to remove burnt objects from a barricade.

Elsewhere in the country, traffic disruptions were reported on major roads in Marseille, Montpellier, Nantes, and Lyon.

Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau told reporters a group of protesters had torched a bus in the Breton city of Rennes.

Fourth prime minister in a year

The ‘Block Everything’ rallies come amid spiralling national debt and are similar to the Yellow Vest movement that broke out over tax increases during President Emmanuel Macron’s first term.

‘Bloquons tout’ was first spearheaded online by right-wing groups in May but has since been embraced by the left and far left, experts say.

On Monday, former Prime Minister Francois Bayrou lost a vote of no confidence, and was replaced by Sebastien Lecornu at the Hotel Matignon on Wednesday afternoon, becoming the fourth person in the job in just 12 months.

A teacher, Christophe Lalande, taking part in the Paris protests, told reporters at the scene: “Bayrou was ousted, [now] his policies must be eliminated.”

Elsewhere, union member Amar Lagha said: “This day is a message to all the workers of this country: that there is no resignation, the fight continues, and a message to this government that we won’t back down, and if we have to die, we’ll die standing.”

World

Israel has crossed a huge diplomatic red line with Qatar strike

Published

11 hours ago

September 10, 2025

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Israel has crossed a huge diplomatic red line with Qatar strike

A lot has changed in Qatar in just 24 hours.

Israel brought its war with Hamas to the streets of Doha and people can’t quite believe it.

The sound of explosions on Tuesday afternoon in a residential neighbourhood has shattered the sense of peace and security that defines life here.

Israel-Hamas latest – Qatar attack puts talks in doubt

It’s also shattered the critical sense of trust needed in these fragile ceasefire talks.

Qatar has played a critical role as an intermediary between Israel and Hamas for the last two years and those diplomatic efforts have been blown apart by this unprecedented attack.

Qatar has reacted with absolute fury and it has shocked and angered other Gulf neighbours, who, like Qatar, stake their reputation on being hubs of regional peace and stability.

Donald Trump is clearly unhappy, too. A strike on Qatar – a key American ally and home to Al Udeid Air Base, the largest US military hub in the Middle East – is seen as a dangerous escalation.

There’s no suggestion that permission was sought by Israel from its own closest ally in Washington.

And there’s little clarity if they were even forewarned by the IDF, as the White House said it learned of the attack from its own military.

Donald Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, was then tasked with alerting Qatar immediately, but by this point, it was too late.

According to Qatar’s foreign ministry, that call came 10 minutes after the first explosion was heard in Doha.

It’s clear Israel has crossed a huge diplomatic red line here.

Qatar plays a pivotal role on the international stage, punching well above its diplomatic weight for a country of its size.

For decades, it has hosted negotiations in a number of conflicts, providing a safe haven for warring parties to hold talks.

Arguably, far more is achieved in Doha’s many five-star hotels than on any battlefield.

But there was never any sense that you were in danger here.

During the chaotic evacuation of Afghanistan in August 2021, I interviewed the Taliban in Doha.

It was a constructive and civil interview where their international leader presented their position to the world on Sky News.

It was vital information and there was never any sense we were at risk in meeting to talk here.

There is so much at stake in the Israel-Hamas war.

More than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed, children are starving in Gaza and 48 Israeli hostages have not been returned home.

What was Israel thinking, carrying out this attack? And was it worth it?

They claim it was a “precise strike”, but none of the Hamas leadership were taken out as they claimed was their objective.

Five lower-ranking officials were killed along with a member of Qatar’s security forces. What it has done is left any hope of ceasefire talks in tatters.

For many, this was a huge miscalculation by Benjamin Netanyahu.