21,323 named records across 454 pages is what the Ministry of Health in Gaza published on 3 April 2024 as its list of the dead to 29 March, a party to the war reporting its own count and not an independently verified one. The document has seven columns, and a reader can see what it holds: a source column splitting every entry into a ministry record or a family’s notification, a date of birth but no date of death, and no column anywhere for combatant status. Three more lists followed that year, and the ministry states five categories of death it does not count.
Key Findings
- The list to 29 March 2024 carries 21,323 records across 454 pages in seven columns, serial number, name, identity number, date of birth, sex, age and source, which the Ministry of Health in Gaza published as its own count.
- The provenance column splits the record in two: on the list to 30 June 2024, the Ministry of Health in Gaza records 22,368 of 28,185 entries as ministry records and 5,817 as notifications by relatives, the two summing exactly to the total.
- The Ministry of Health in Gaza states five categories of death it does not count, among them the missing and those under rubble, the unidentified who reached hospitals, and those buried by families without passing through a hospital, in a statement of 7 January 2024 it has never withdrawn.
- No column in any of the four lists records combatant status, and a university research project report that is not peer-reviewed states that the ministry publishes no combatant-noncombatant breakdown at all (Crawford, 2025).
- The range most often quoted for the ministry’s historical accuracy, 1.5% to 3.8%, sits in a one-page Lancet correspondence letter measuring 35 days from 7 October 2023, in a sentence carrying no reference marker (Huynh, Chin and Spiegel, 2024).
What does the Gaza health ministry actually publish?
21,323 named records across 454 pages is the list of the dead to 29 March 2024 that the Ministry of Health in Gaza published on 3 April 2024, a party to the war reporting its own count and not an independently verified one. Seven columns run across each page: serial number, name, identity number, date of birth, sex, age, and source.
The file runs to roughly 15 MB. Each row is a person, and the final column records which channel produced that record. The Ministry of Health in Gaza states its own coverage limits in a footnote closing the document: for decedents held in ministry records, Gaza governorate runs only to 10 November 2023 and the southern governorates to 29 March 2024, except Nasser, which runs to 14 February 2024.
Three further lists followed. The Ministry of Health in Gaza published 24,682 records to 30 April 2024 across 498 pages, 28,185 records to 30 June across 532 pages, and 34,344 to 31 August across 649 pages. The schema is not stable across them: the April document carries six columns and a different set, with an address field, no date of birth and no source column at all. The June and August documents return to seven, with the identity field relabelled a document number.
None of this is an independently verified count. It is a party to the war publishing a register of its own dead, and the arithmetic, the provenance and the gaps in it are that party’s own. What it is not is an unexplained figure, because the columns are there to be read.
Where does the ministry publish the lists?
2,536 PDF files sit in the media library of the Gaza health ministry’s own website, the newest dated 21 October 2023, and not one of them is a casualty list. The Ministry of Health in Gaza has published no file to its own web host since that date. Its lists reach a reader only through its media office channel on Telegram, which serves message text and serves no file.
That leaves the most granular casualty record any party to this war has issued sitting on no government web host at all. The statistics page the Ministry of Health in Gaza publishes for cumulative Gaza Strip figures is an empty shell dated 10 May 2023, and the platform it now names for interactive statistics returned a not-found error on the path the ministry itself gives.
The consequence is easy to state and rarely stated. Almost every reader who holds an opinion about these numbers, in either direction, is working from a relay: a news summary, a dataset mirror, a study, or somebody’s characterisation of a document they have not opened. The four files read for this report came from a public dataset mirror, and the March file matches the size and the record count the ministry’s own posting states for it.
That is a fact about the record rather than about anyone’s conduct, and it cuts both ways. A party that wanted its count taken on trust would have reason to host it, and a reader who wants to check it has to leave the issuing body’s site to do so.
Which deaths does the ministry say it does not count?
Five categories of death sit outside the count, on a statement of 7 January 2024 that has never been withdrawn. The Ministry of Health in Gaza states that it does not count the missing or the bodies under rubble; the unidentified who reached hospitals; the unidentified whose bodies Israel handed over; those buried by families without passing through a hospital; or victims in Gaza and North Gaza after its information system stopped in November 2023.
Each exclusion is a different kind of gap. The first is a category the ministry cannot see. The second and third are deaths it has physically registered but cannot name, so they cannot enter a list built on names. The fourth never touched the health system. The fifth is a hole in time and place: the system feeding the record stopped working in two governorates partway through the first month of the war, which is the same fact the March list’s footnote records when it caps Gaza governorate at 10 November 2023.
Read together, the five describe an instrument rather than a census. The register counts people who reached a hospital and could be identified there, or whose families came forward and were entered. That construction has a direction: every one of the five exclusions removes deaths from the record rather than adding them.
What the exclusions do not settle is any total. They establish what the instrument was built to capture and what it was not, and the Ministry of Health in Gaza stated them itself, on a date a reader can check.
Where does each name on the list come from?
22,368 of the 28,185 records on the list to 30 June 2024 are labelled سجلات وزارة الصحة, ministry records, and the remaining 5,817 are labelled تبليغ ذوي الشهداء, notification by the decedents’ relatives. The two add to the published total exactly, entry by entry, on the ministry’s own count.
The earlier list to 29 March splits the same way, 18,845 ministry records against 2,478 family notifications, again summing exactly to its published total. This is the most useful field in the document and the one least often mentioned in argument about it. A reader is not asked to accept one undifferentiated number: the Ministry of Health in Gaza records, entry by entry, which of two channels produced it.
The family-notified share also grew fast, from 11.6% of the March list to 20.6% of the June list, as the first channel degraded and the second opened on 1 January 2024. That shift is visible in the document itself rather than inferred from anything outside it.
Those two strata are the same two lists a capture-recapture study later used as inputs when it tested the completeness of that registry: the hospital morgue records and the ministry’s own rolling online mortality survey, described for the identical window (Jamaluddine and colleagues, 2025). The study and the register are therefore not two independent counts of one thing. The first is built out of the second, which is a property of the test rather than a defect in either the study or the register.
Does the list record when each person died?
No column in any of the four documents is a date of death. The string تاريخ الاستشهاد, date of martyrdom, appears in no column header of the lists to 29 March, 30 April, 30 June or 31 August 2024. What the lists carry instead is a date of birth, which the April document drops altogether.
The Ministry of Health in Gaza has stated why. In a clarification of 29 July 2024 it recorded that the date was registered either on the family’s report or on the date the body reached the hospital, and that a committee formed to audit the actual date of death found decedents who had been under 18 when they died but were registered several months later.
That is a party’s own audit of its own record rather than an external one. It is also specific: the defect it names is a lag between death and registration, running in a known direction, with a named consequence for the age field.
The date fields the lists do carry are not clean either. On the March list, ministry-record rows print full dates in the form 30/03/1993 while family-notified rows print two-digit years with dashes, 13-02-97. On the August list the oldest decedents carry 01-01-27, 01-01-24 and 01-01-22 against ages of 97, 100 and 101, which a reader parsing the column mechanically would read as 2027, 2024 and 2022.
So the register is a list of people the Ministry of Health in Gaza states died, with no per-person date of when. A toll for any window cannot be built from these documents by filtering a column, because the column is not there.
Does any column carry combatant or civilian status?
None of the seven columns on any of the four lists is combatant status, and a university research project report that is not peer-reviewed states that the Ministry of Health in Gaza publishes no combatant-noncombatant breakdown at all (Crawford, 2025). Serial number, name, identity or document number, date of birth, sex, age and source is the complete set.
The ministry does publish demographic shares. Its Health Annual Report for 2025 records children at 30%, women 16%, elderly 7% and men 47% of decedents for 2023 to 2025, against a stated total of 71,271. Those four shares partition the whole. They are a breakdown by age and sex, and they carry nothing about whether anyone counted was a combatant.
This is what makes any subtraction across the books hazardous. A fighter count published by one party and a decedent count published by another are records with no shared identifier and no common field, so there is nothing in either document to reconcile them against. That is the structural reason what each body counts is the first question to ask of a casualty figure.
The absence is not a contested inference. It is visible in the column headers of every list the Ministry of Health in Gaza has published, it holds across the schema change between the March and April documents, and it is what a reader finds on opening the file rather than what anyone says about it. A register that records sex and age and not status can support a demographic claim and cannot support a combatant one.
Does the ministry publish a separate count of natural deaths?
No ministry document separates natural deaths from war deaths. The Ministry of Health in Gaza stated on 24 July 2024 that its general count is everyone who reached the hospitals, and it publishes no second series netting out deaths from other causes. The lists carry no cause-of-death column, just as they carry no status column.
The only published number attaching to natural deaths in Gaza during the war therefore sits inside another body’s arithmetic. The Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs published in 2025 a ceiling of at most 41,000 civilians in Gaza who died of war-related causes, reached by removing estimated natural deaths and Israel’s count of 21,000 fighters killed from the ministry total for the war through October 2025.
The Jerusalem Center states on the same page that neither what it calls the Hamas claim of the Gaza total nor Israel’s estimate of fighters killed has been independently confirmed, and that the first of the two has been challenged. It presents the 41,000 as a stated ceiling rather than a count. Both inputs are a party’s own reported figure, one from each side, and the natural-mortality term is an estimate that institute supplied rather than one drawn from any register.
So the question of whether natural deaths sit inside the published total has two accurate answers, and they are not in tension. The ministry’s own definition covers everyone who reached a hospital, which does not exclude them by construction. And no document from the ministry, in any of the four lists or in either annual report read here, breaks them out.
Do the ministry’s own totals reconcile with each other?
The ministry’s two published components for 30 June 2024 add to 37,900, which is the cumulative figure in its own daily report of the following morning rather than the 37,877 its report for 30 June states. The Ministry of Health in Gaza published both components together on 24 July 2024, and they do not reconcile against the total it had itself issued three weeks earlier.
The components are 28,185 records with complete data and 9,715 whose data was not yet complete. The gap is twenty-three records and one day, and it is not a rounding artefact: a reader subtracting 28,185 from the 30 June total gets 9,692. It is the signature of a period-end figure taken from the next day’s report, and the same slip runs through the ministry’s annual reporting. The Health Annual Report for 2024 states 45,553 decedents and 108,379 injuries for the period between 7 October 2023 and 31 December 2024. Those are exactly the figures in the daily report of 1 January 2025, while the ministry’s own figure for 30 December 2024 is 45,541, and it issued no report at all on 31 December.
Two things follow, pointing in different directions. The first is that the ministry’s published numbers do not always agree with each other, which anyone quoting one of them should know. The second is that the discrepancy is recoverable: it resolves to a one-day offset, it is the same offset in both places, and it is found by comparing the ministry’s documents against each other rather than against anything external.
What does the ministry add by committee approval?
233 records entered the cumulative total on 23 March 2025, not because 233 people had newly died, but because a judicial committee had completed and approved them following the notifications and missing-persons file. The Ministry of Health in Gaza recorded the addition in those terms itself, and it has repeated the practice twice since.
The ministry’s daily report that same day put the cumulative total at 50,021. The Ministry of Health in Gaza then recorded 280 further records on 30 August 2025 and 160 during August 2026, the last credited to a martyrs’ approval committee. This is the mechanism that moves a cumulative total without a corresponding event, and the ministry announces it rather than absorbing it silently. The additions are records that already existed as reports or as missing-persons entries and were later adjudicated into the count, which is the back end of the same two-channel structure the source column describes.
It also means the cumulative total and the named list are different objects on different clocks. The list grows when data is completed. The total grows both when deaths are reported and when a committee approves a backlog, and the headline figure does not distinguish the two.
A reader comparing the total on two dates is therefore not reading a count of deaths between them. In all, 673 records entered the running total across those three announcements alone, each one a record completed rather than a death occurring in the announcement window.
What did the letter cited for the ministry’s accuracy measure?
35 days is the entire measurement window of the study most often produced as evidence that the ministry’s figures are accurate: 7 October to 10 November 2023. The Lancet published it in 2024 as a one-page correspondence letter, editorially reviewed and not peer-reviewed, and it measures nothing at all before 2023 (Huynh, Chin and Spiegel, 2024).
What the letter measures is a comparison of cumulative reported deaths over those 35 days against staff deaths the United Nations Relief and Works Agency published for the same window, an agency with a position in the conflict, named here only as a component of that comparison. The letter reports a mortality rate for the ministry’s figures lower than the rate for the agency’s staff, and reasons from that direction.
The title is an absence claim, and the distinction is load-bearing. No evidence of inflated reporting is not the same proposition as verified, and the letter’s own text states that the ministry’s figures over the period “might have been under-reported” because of reduced capacity. It adds that difficulty obtaining accurate figures should not be read as intentional misreporting, which is a caution against the inference in the other direction.
So a document written about five weeks of a war, by three authors at one school of public health, in a journal’s correspondence section, carries a claim about a decade of counts. That is a mismatch between what was measured and what is cited, and it is visible from the letter’s own first paragraph.
Where does the 1.5% to 3.8% accuracy range come from?
The sentence carrying the 1.5% to 3.8% range bears no reference marker at all. In the journal’s own typesetting the superscript markers close the sentences on either side of it, and the sentence stating that the ministry’s reporting differed from independent analyses by that range in previous conflicts carries none (Huynh, Chin and Spiegel, 2024).
The arithmetic behind it is nonetheless reproducible, and it terminates in a news article. The letter’s adjacent reference is an Associated Press explainer published on 26 October 2023 and updated the following month, which prints three dated pairs of figures and no percentage anywhere. For 2008 the Ministry of Health in Gaza reported 1,440 against a United Nations humanitarian office’s post-war toll of 1,385; for 2014, 2,310 against 2,251; for 2021, 260 against 256.
Divide each difference by the ministry’s own count and the three published figures appear exactly: 1.5% for 2021, 2.6% for 2014 and 3.8% for 2008. Divide by the other body’s count instead and they do not. So the range is a share of the ministry’s own denominator, which the letter never states, and the 2014 case sits inside the range rather than at either end, which means the endpoints are the smallest and largest of three cases and not a bound on anything.
The same explainer carries the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s own count of 2,125 for 2014, which against 2,310 gives the 8.0% figure the letter reports separately in the next sentence. That sentence does carry a marker.
Has any study tested a pre-2023 ministry count?
None was located. A search run on 10 September 2026 across the biomedical and preprint paper index, in two framings returning thirty results, and across the open web, found no published study comparing a Gaza health ministry count from before 2023 against any other body’s count. An absence, not a finding, is what the literature holds on the question most often treated as settled.
The nearest published item is a different object. A chart review in Conflict and Health covering non-war mortality in Gaza from July to September 2014 recorded 1,241 deaths against 1,232 in the same months of 2013 (Vaktskjold and colleagues, 2016). It studies ordinary mortality in a health system and runs no comparison of one body’s count against another’s.
The only peer-reviewed test of the register that does exist covers 2023 to 2024 and nothing earlier, and it was built from the ministry’s own two channels (Jamaluddine and colleagues, 2025). So the record holds one modern test, of one recent window, using the register’s own inputs.
That is worth stating plainly because of the weight the absent study is carrying. The claim that the Ministry of Health in Gaza has historically reported accurately is doing real work in public argument, and it rests on one uncited sentence in a correspondence letter, reproducing from three number pairs in a news explainer, comparing a party’s own count against a second body’s post-war tolls for three conflicts. Whatever else that is, it is not a study, and no study of it was found.
Methodology
This report reads documents. The primary material is the four named lists of decedents the Ministry of Health in Gaza published in 2024, covering deaths to 29 March, 30 April, 30 June and 31 August, together with its daily statistical reports, its dated statements on exclusions, dates of death and committee approvals, and its Health Annual Report for 2024 and for 2025. Every figure drawn from them is a party’s own count, published by a health ministry under the authority governing Gaza, and is labelled as such wherever it appears.
Column sets, record counts and source-column splits were read from the list files rather than from any description of them. Because the ministry hosts no casualty list on its own site, the four files came from a public dataset mirror; the March file matches the size and the record count the ministry’s own posting states.
Two secondary sources are read closely rather than relayed: the correspondence letter in The Lancet, 2024, in its full text and its typeset form, and the Associated Press explainer that letter cites. Figures inside the letter that originate with United Nations agencies are named as components of that comparison and support no finding here.
The lists name every decedent individually, and no name from them appears in this report. Arabic column headers were read in the original and are glossed in English. Where the ministry’s documents disagree, both figures are given with their dates rather than reconciled.
Conclusion
Open the four lists and the question changes shape: 21,323 rows on the first of them carry a name and an identity number, and a provenance column says which of two channels produced each entry. A date of birth sits where a reader expects a date of death. Five stated exclusions each remove deaths rather than add them. A twenty-three-record disagreement between two of the ministry’s own totals resolves to a one-day offset, and hundreds of records enter the running total by committee approval rather than by anyone dying.
None of that is a verification, and the Ministry of Health in Gaza is a party to the war reporting on itself. But it is not an unexplained number either, and the strongest claim in either direction turns out to rest on the least document. The range quoted for the ministry’s historical accuracy is one uncited sentence in a one-page correspondence letter whose own measurement covers thirty-five days, and no study comparing a pre-2023 ministry count against another body’s count was found to exist.
The word in the question does work the documents do not. Calling a figure propaganda and calling it verified are both claims about provenance, and provenance is the one thing these files are unusually explicit about: which channel, which cut-off date, which categories left out, which committee approved what and when. The lists the Ministry of Health in Gaza published have been public since April 2024 and run to name and identity number, and the argument over them has been conducted almost entirely by people who have not opened one. When a number arrives already wearing the word that decides how it will be read, what is left for the columns underneath it to change?
Frequently Asked Questions
How many lists has the Gaza health ministry published?
Four dated lists of decedents with complete data were read for this report, covering deaths to 29 March, 30 April, 30 June and 31 August 2024. The Ministry of Health in Gaza also publishes separate category lists for children, women, the elderly and the orphans of decedents.
Does the ministry publish a daily figure as well as the lists?
Yes. The Ministry of Health in Gaza publishes a daily statistical report carrying cumulative totals, which on 10 September 2026 stood at 73,670 decedents and 174,682 injuries on its own count. The daily total and the named list move on different clocks.
What does the ministry mean by a record with complete data?
It gave both definitions itself on 24 July 2024. The general count is everyone who reached the hospitals; the complete-data count is everyone whose record the ministry has finished processing. The named lists publish only the second, which is why each list is smaller than the cumulative total on its date.
Does the ministry publish figures on children specifically?
Yes, separately from the lists. On 23 March 2025 the ministry’s Director General reported 15,613 children among a cumulative 50,021 decedents, of whom 872 had not completed their first year, and 247 children born and killed during the war. These are a party’s own counts.
Does the Palestinian statistical authority produce its own casualty count?
No. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics reported 70,942 deaths in Gaza by the end of December 2025 and attributed the figure to the Palestinian Ministry of Health rather than measuring it. Its own work in that brief is a demographic accounting of population change.
Do other bodies republish the ministry’s figures as their own?
They republish them as the ministry’s. A Costs of War project report carries 67,075 killed and 169,430 injured as of 3 October 2025 and names the Gaza Ministry of Health as the source, taken from a United Nations dashboard that relays it (Crawford, 2025).
Sources
- Crawford, N. C., 2025. The Human Toll of the Gaza War: Direct and Indirect Death from 7 October 2023 to 3 October 2025. Costs of War project, Watson School of International and Public Affairs, Brown University. costsofwar.watson.brown.edu. University research project report, not peer-reviewed.
- Debre, I., 2023. Associated Press explainer on the Gaza Ministry of Health and how the war’s death toll is calculated, 26 October 2023, updated 6 November 2023. Associated Press. International press.
- Huynh, B. Q., Chin, E. T., and Spiegel, P. B., 2024. No evidence of inflated mortality reporting from the Gaza Ministry of Health. The Lancet, 403(10421), pp. 23 to 24. DOI 10.1016/S0140-6736(23)02713-7. PMID 38070526. Correspondence letter, editorially reviewed, not peer-reviewed.
- Jamaluddine, Z., Abukmail, H., Aly, S., Campbell, O. M. R., and Checchi, F., 2025. Traumatic injury mortality in the Gaza Strip from Oct 7, 2023, to June 30, 2024: a capture-recapture analysis. The Lancet, 405(10477), pp. 469 to 477. DOI 10.1016/S0140-6736(24)02678-3. Peer-reviewed journal.
- Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, 2025. The Death of Genocide. jcfa.org. Research institute.
- Ministry of Health, Gaza. Daily statistical reports and dated statements on exclusions, dates of death and committee approvals, 7 October 2023 to 10 September 2026, issued through the ministry media office channel. Official record published by a party to the war, self-reported.
- Ministry of Health, Gaza, 2024. The four published lists of decedents with complete data, covering deaths to 29 March, 30 April, 30 June and 31 August 2024. Official record published by a party to the war, self-reported.
- Ministry of Health, Palestine, 2025. Health Annual Report, Palestine 2024. site.moh.ps. Official record published by a party to the war, self-reported.
- Ministry of Health, Palestine, 2026. Health Annual Report, Palestine 2025. site.moh.ps. Official record published by a party to the war, self-reported.
- Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2025. A Brief on the Status of the Palestinian People at the End of 2025. Ramallah. pcbs.gov.ps. Official record, national statistical office.
- Vaktskjold, A., and colleagues, 2016. Chart review of non-war mortality in the Gaza Strip, July to September 2014. Conflict and Health. DOI 10.1186/s13031-016-0077-6. Peer-reviewed journal.