The Numbers Show: Gaza War Is One of the Bloodiest in the 21st Century

One of the favorite arguments of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and other Israeli spokespeople, is to accuse the international community of hypocrisy concerning the war in the Gaza Strip – and to claim it is ignoring other conflicts and humanitarian disasters.

In his speech to Congress, Netanyahu took pride in what he claimed was a low rate of civilian casualties compared to other wars, and certainly those in urban areas.

"Where was South Africa when millions were killed or expelled from their homes in Syria and Yemen," said Netanyahu in January, for example. But a cold examination of the numbers killed in the Gaza Strip reveals this is one of the bloodiest wars since the beginning of the century, especially if you examine the rate of mortality out of the total population.

Close to 40,000 people have been killed in the Gaza Strip since October 7. In percentage terms that's 2 percent of the population of about 2 million people. For comparison, 2 percent of Israel's population is some 198,000 people. "In terms of the total number of dead, I assume Gaza won't be among the 10 most violent conflicts of the 21st century," Prof. Michael Spagat of the University of London told Haaretz.

"But compared to the percentage of the population killed," Spagat says he assumes it is already among the top five. Spagat is a researcher of war and armed conflict and monitors the number of casualties in conflicts. "If we factor in the amount of time it took to kill one percent of this population, then it could be unprecedented," he said.

The figures on the number of people killed in the Gaza Strip are based on information released by the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza, controlled by Hamas. Since the beginning of the fighting, the information has been examined by a large number of international organizations, governments and media outlets and there is a broad consensus that the information is credible.

At the beginning of the month, the Palestinian Health Ministry released a list with 28,185 names of those killed. The list includes four names for each person: Their first and last names, father and grandfather's names – as well as their ID number, birthdate and age. Already back then, there were about another 11,000 people who were known to have died, but their identification was not confirmed or their full details were missing. Since then, others have been added.

Airwars, a British organization that assesses civilian casualties, issued a broad investigative report that carefully studies 3,000 names released by the Hamas Health Ministry, of people killed in the first 17 days of the war. The organization cross-referenced these names with names from other information sources, such as social media and media reports.

75 percent of the names collected by Airwars' activists appeared in the Health Ministry lists. The "investigation found a high correlation between the official [Ministry of Health] data and what Palestinian civilians reported online," states Airwars. But the authors note that in recent months the health infrastructure in Gaza has been severely damaged by the war, and "evidence suggests the Ministry of Health figures have become less accurate."

A mass funeral in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on March 7, 2024.Credit: SAID KHATIB / AFP

Spagat has also studied the lists and found a low incidence of problematic data, such as missing or mismatched ID numbers. On the up-to-date list he located about 700 problematic entries out of 28,185. An analysis of the data revealed that 10,418 of those listed as dead are women (including female children and teens), 6,095 are children under the age of 12 and 566 are infants younger than one year old.

"It's not a perfect list, but in the big picture the information is very reliable," he said. He adds that "the fact that the Palestinian Health Ministry releases the details enables independent sources to check them. In contrast, the Israeli government does not provide any information concerning the number of dead except for the number of terrorists killed, and this too is provided without any foundation," added Spagat.

Between Gaza and Bosnia

A statistical comparison between the number of victims in violent conflicts is a very complex matter: The causes of the outbreak of violence, the size of the forces fighting and the differences between them, the battlegrounds and weapons – all these are very different from one another. In addition, the warring sides always have an interest in distorting the data, and the line distinguishing between armed people and uninvolved civilians is often a thin and blurred one.

To examine the intensity of the war in Gaza compared to other wars, Haaretz used the database of the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) based at Uppsala University in Sweden, which is considered to be one of the best databases in the world on such matters. Prof. Dan Miodownik of the department of political science and international relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, an expert on conflict processes, says the database relies on confirmed reports of incidents with deaths and allows access to the database to determine what is the source of the information for every person killed.

From a global perspective, there are quite a few conflicts that are more lethal than the one in the Gaza Strip – but the war has already caused a lot more deaths than a number of other outbreaks of violence elsewhere in the world in recent years. In the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, for example, about 25,000 people have been killed, according to the United Nations. In the Yazidi genocide by the Islamic State in 2015, estimates from experts are that 9,100 people were killed, half of them through direct violence and the other half from starvation and disease – in addition to thousands kidnapped.

But in terms of the pace of deaths, the war in Gaza ranks as one of the most lethal conflicts since the turn of the century. Since the war began, the mortality rate in Gaza averages about 4,000 deaths a month. By comparison, in the first year of the war in Ukraine, the death rate reached 7,736 a month, while in the bloodiest year of the war in Iraq, 2015, the death toll was approximately 1,370 a month. In these two wars, the total number of people killed was much higher than in the war in Gaza, but both those conflicts lasted, and are still going on, for a much longer time.

The war in Gaza also stands out in comparison to wars from the 1990s, for example those that took place in the former state of Yugoslavia. One of these regions was Bosnia, and in the worst year of the conflict, 1991, the average number of deaths per month was 2,097 – and the total number killed over four years there was 63,000.

Displaced Palestinian children wait for food in in Deir al-Balah, Gaza, last week.Credit: AFP

No way out

The difference that stands out the most between the rest of the wars of the 21st century and the war in the Gaza Strip is the size of the territory where the fighting is taking place, and the inability of the uninvolved civilians to flee the battles – and in particular the percentage of casualties among the overall population.

The fronts in the largest wars of this century – in Syria, Iraq and Ukraine – were stretched out over thousands of kilometers and the carnage took place in hundreds of different locations. Even more important, the civilians in those places could, even if at a painful price, flee to safer areas. From Syria, over a million refugees left for other countries, such as Jordan, Turkey and European nations. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees left the frontline regions and moved west.

The size of Gaza – 360 square kilometers (139 square miles) – is a fraction of the size of Ukraine, and fighting has taken place almost everywhere in the Gaza Strip. Most of the residents of Gaza have been displaced, but their escape to areas the Israel Defense Forces has designated as safe zones has not always helped, and many have been killed in these areas too. In addition, the living conditions in these humanitarian zones are very harsh and the refugees suffer from overcrowding, disease, a lack of safe shelter, a shortage of medicines and more.

"When we look at the situation in Gaza compared to other situations, then mostly the story of the civilian population is one of leaving, sometimes flight, sometimes expulsion, sometimes a temporary move – it's people becoming refugees," said Miodownik. "In Gaza, the Palestinians cannot be refugees. The only way to flee was to pay $10,000 to a smuggler and cross via one of the tunnels to Egypt. This too is no longer possible. This means the population is stuck in a situation and that is one of the most terrible things," he said.

But the figure that demonstrates more than anything else the scale of the humanitarian disaster in Gaza is the percentage of mortality compared to the size of the total population. The death of 2 percent of the residents of a region within less than a year is an extremely exceptional occurrence in the era of warfare after World War II, especially outside of Africa. In Ukraine, as a point of comparison, so far 0.45 percent of the civilian population has been killed, according to the strictest estimates. During the Vietnam War, estimates are that 5 percent of the population was killed – but this was a war that lasted almost 20 years in various incarnations, and weaponry was used indiscriminately and widely. In Syria, according to strict estimates, about 2 percent of the population was killed, similar to Gaza, but the difference is significant – the Syrian war has dragged on for 13 years ago.

In his speech to Congress, Netanyahu took pride in what he claimed was a low rate of civilian casualties compared to other wars, and certainly those in urban areas. But Spagat, who studied the data, rejects this claim. He says that about 60 to 65 percent of Gaza's casualties are not militants, and this is quite a similar ratio to that of urban areas in Iraq and Syria. Spagat says that when the Israeli ground attack began, there was an improvement in the ratio with more adult men killed relative to women and children. He notes that a further improvement occurred after South Africa submitted its petition to the world court charging Israeli with genocide. But even after those "improvements" the civilian death toll is still more or less the similar to what we saw in Iraq, he added.

A funeral in southern Gaza, last month.Credit: AFP

A low estimate?

A number of documents have been published in recent weeks about illness and death in Gaza. The first was a short article by three doctors published July 5 in the journal Lancet, claiming that on the basis of a comparison with other conflicts and examination of the humanitarian and medical conditions in the Gaza Strip, the number of dead is expected to soar in the coming months and reach 186,000, most of them from disease and infections. Three weeks later, on July 25, 45 American doctors and members of medical teams who worked in hospitals in Gaza in the past months published an open letter to U.S. President Joe Biden claiming that the number of dead is much higher than had been reported so far.

"With only marginal exceptions, everyone in Gaza is sick, injured, or both." They claim that 92,000 people have already died in the Gaza Strip, adding: "This includes every national aid worker, every international volunteer, and probably every Israeli hostage: every man, woman, and child." The letter was published around the same time as a World Health Organization report that presented very harsh statistics concerning the death toll in Gaza, contending that since October about 1 million cases of serious pulmonary infections and 577,000 cases of severe diarrhea have been reported. In addition, there are also many people injured – about 92,000 individuals, according to the Health Ministry in Gaza.

Spagat believes that some of these assessments are exaggerated. According to him, there is no clear evidence of mass starvation and mass death from disease in Gaza and that most of the fatalities have been caused directly by the war – in bombings or shootings and as a result of wounds inflicted during the fighting. "If we are attempting to estimate, I don't think starvation is significant relative to the number of people killed, at least so far," he says. "But it is liable to start happening. It seems to me that there has been an increase in the flow of aid to Gaza. It could be that this is because of South Africa's lawsuit – with respect to the timing, that corresponds."

Miodownik warns that such extensive mortality in the population will have long-term effects. "Violence has a result: It leaves a multi-generational imprint. Even if there is a rosy future here and the Gaza Strip flourishes, it will have effects. We will see this in the ability to recover, in the behavior in everyday life and in political perceptions. It's like someone who has post-traumatic stress syndrome – you can try to deal with it but ultimately it stays with you."

The IDF Spokesman's Office responded: "Reliance on the overall number of dead that Hamas reports via the Health and Information Ministries it controls, without casting doubt and criticism on the reliability of the figures is a mistake. These numbers make no distinction between terrorists and civilians, there is no detailing of the number of people killed as a direct result of the many failed launches by the terror organization and the data include many biases, including non-existent identity numbers, duplications of names of the dead, reliance on sources not subject o confirmation and more. According to information in the possession of the IDF, many on the lists of the dead are terrorists and the categorizations that are shown do not conform to the reality – as, for example, high-ranking and known terrorists who are listed in the Health Ministry reports as women.

"The IDF is committed to international law and acts in accordance with it, and as such directs its attacks only at military targets, terrorists and civilians who directly take part in the fighting. Despite the challenge in fighting a terror organization that places the citizens of Gaza as a human shield and operates from among them, the IDF is acting to limit the harm to civilians in the framework of the attacks insofar as possible. In the context of this effort, more than 100,000 live telephone calls have been made during the course of the war, along with more than 19 million recorded calls and tens of millions of text messages and airdropped pamphlets for purposes of warning a population. Moreover, announcements were made concerning evacuation of the population from north to south, along with the opening of a humanitarian zone in the area of Al-Mawasi that includes extensive humanitarian provisions to the population, including water, food, equipment for shelters and extensive humanitarian infrastructure as well as the purchase of 40,000 tents for use by the population."