The Gaza Ministry of Health is the one body that publishes a count of Palestinian children killed in Gaza as children: its Director General stated on 23 March 2025 that 15,613 of the 50,021 people then on the ministry’s register were children, 872 of them under a year old. That is a party to the war reporting its own count, self-reported and not independently verified. The question is usually answered by a single unnamed authority, “UN findings,” which never reaches that register or the documents that build it. This report reads those documents: how a child’s age arrives in the record, which children the ministry’s own stated exclusions leave outside it, and what the other party’s records carry on the same axis.
Key Findings
- 15,613 of the 50,021 people on the Gaza Ministry of Health’s register were children, and 247 of them were born and killed during the war, on the statement its Director General issued on 23 March 2025. Every figure here is the ministry’s own count, self-reported by a party to the war and not independently verified.
- The ministry publishes children as a separate list rather than as a share of another count. Beside a combined list of 24,682 records running to 498 pages for the round to 30 April 2024, it published category lists for children, women, the elderly and the orphans of martyrs, and continued the practice through the rounds of 15 June and 15 July 2025.
- No published round of the list carries a date of death. The Gaza Ministry of Health stated on 29 July 2024 that a death was registered on the family’s report or on the date a body reached a hospital, and that a committee it then formed to audit the actual date found martyrs who had been under 18 at death registered several months later.
- The 13,319 child figure and the total printed beside it do not share a base. The ministry’s Health Annual Report, Palestine 2024 states 13,319 child martyrs with complete data to 7 October 2024 against a total of 43,587 at 11 December 2024, so a share taken from the pair divides a numerator into a base two months later.
- Israel’s own investigation record carries no category defined by the age of the person harmed. The Military Advocate General’s Corps counts 74 criminal investigations opened as at 3 August 2024 in five categories, against over 1,000 incidents referred for factual assessment. The count is the Corps’ own, of investigations opened rather than of findings.
Which body publishes a count of Palestinian children killed in Gaza?
The Gaza Ministry of Health publishes it, and it is a party to the war. Its Director General stated on 23 March 2025 that 15,613 of the 50,021 people then on the ministry’s register were children, and that 872 of them had not completed their first year. The count is the ministry’s own, self-reported and not independently verified.
The same statement puts 247 children among the dead as born and killed during the war. The Gaza Ministry of Health stated 115 infants in that category on 13 August 2024, so it has published the figure more than once and revised it upward as its register grew.
The register is name by name rather than a bare total. The Gaza Ministry of Health publishes periodic lists of people whose data it describes as complete, each line carrying a serial number, a name, an identity or document number, sex and age. Four rounds are on the record: 21,323 records to 29 March 2024, 24,682 to 30 April 2024, 28,185 to 30 June 2024 and 34,344 to 31 August 2024.
Two counts run in parallel and are not the same quantity. The cumulative total in the ministry’s daily statistical report counts everyone who reached a hospital; the list counts only the records the ministry has finished. The Gaza Ministry of Health stated the pair itself on 24 July 2024: 28,185 with complete data and 9,715 whose data was not yet complete.
The register also grows by administrative approval rather than by new deaths. The Gaza Ministry of Health recorded 233 additions on 23 March 2025 and 280 on 30 August 2025, describing them as records completed and approved by a judicial committee working from the notifications and missing-persons file, and 160 more during August 2026 through what it calls a martyrs’ approval committee.
All of it is one party’s own reporting, published through the ministry’s own media office by the health ministry of the authority governing Gaza. The labelling duty that binds those figures binds the Israeli figures in the sections below in exactly the same way.
Does the ministry publish children as their own list?
The Gaza Ministry of Health published category lists for children, women, the elderly and the orphans of martyrs beside the combined list of 24,682 records for the round to 30 April 2024, a document running to 498 pages, and continued the practice through the rounds of 15 June and 15 July 2025. The category lists are the ministry’s own, self-reported and not independently verified.
That is a different object from a percentage. A category list is a set of rows, each row a record the ministry states it has completed, so the child count it yields is a count of finished records rather than a share estimated from a total. Whatever else is true of the register, the children in it are enumerated in a document of their own.
The schema is not stable across rounds, which is why a claim about what the ministry publishes has to name the round. The list to 30 April 2024 carries six columns: serial number, name, document number, age, address and sex. The rounds to 29 March, 30 June and 31 August 2024 carry seven, dropping the address and adding a date of birth and a source column. So the fields available to check an age against differ between one published round and the next.
This matters for a question the Institute has already answered the other way. Its report on what UN documents find about children recorded, on the evidence base assembled there, that no register in it counted Gaza’s children as children, and its report on what each share counts recorded the same absence for military-violence deaths. Read directly, the ministry’s own channel holds the register both reports could not find. It is a party’s register rather than an independent one, which is the reason to read how it is built rather than to stop at the total it produces.
How does a child’s age reach the record?
No date-of-death column appears in any of the four published rounds of the Gaza Ministry of Health’s list; three carry a date of birth and the round to 30 April 2024 carries age and address instead. The ministry stated on 29 July 2024 that a death was registered on the family’s report or on the date a body reached a hospital.
The same statement records what the Gaza Ministry of Health found when it checked. It formed a committee to audit the actual date of death, and that committee found that a number of martyrs had been under 18 at death while being registered several months later. The Gaza Ministry of Health published that finding itself, which is the strongest available description of how age and date interact inside the register.
The mechanism follows from the columns. A record fixes a birth date and a registration event, and the age it prints is the distance between them. Where a body reached a hospital months after death, or where a family reported a death months after it occurred, the registration event is not the death, so the age in the row and the age at death can differ. The Gaza Ministry of Health recorded that finding itself, which is the evidence that this happened.
The Gaza Ministry of Health records where each row came from, and the two strata are separately counted. In the round to 29 March 2024, 18,845 records are marked as ministry records and 2,478 as notifications by the martyrs’ relatives. In the round to 30 June 2024 the split is 22,368 to 5,817. Both pairs reconcile exactly against their round totals, so the provenance of every row is on the face of the document.
The two strata are recorded differently. Ministry-record rows print full dates; family-notified rows print two-digit years, which a reader has to check against the age column rather than parse directly. None of that is a criticism of the register. It is a description of what the register is: a party’s administrative record, published with its own provenance field, in which the age of a child is derived from a birth date rather than measured at the moment of death.
Do the ministry’s two published child counts rest on the same base?
The Gaza Ministry of Health’s Health Annual Report, Palestine 2024 states 13,319 child martyrs with complete data to 7 October 2024 and prints it beside a total of 43,587 at 11 December 2024. Dividing the one into the other produces a share of a base two months later than its numerator, and both figures are the ministry’s own, self-reported and not independently verified.
The gap widens with the other total the same report prints. The Gaza Ministry of Health reports 45,553 for the whole period to 31 December 2024, which is almost three months past the date the child figure is stated to. Three numbers therefore sit on one page with three different cut-offs, and any share built from them inherits whichever mismatch the reader happens to pick.
The published categories do not partition anything either. Alongside 13,319 children the report gives 7,216 female and 3,447 elderly martyrs. Those three sum to 23,982, a little over half the total printed beside them, and the Health Annual Report publishes no men’s category at all. A fourth figure, 1,057 healthcare-worker martyrs, overlaps all three.
So the Gaza Ministry of Health publishes two child counts on two bases. The 15,613 of March 2025 is stated against a register total of 50,021 at the same date, and those two do share a base. The 13,319 of the annual report is stated against totals recorded weeks and months later, and those do not. A reader who takes the second pair and divides is not making an error of arithmetic; the document invites the division and supplies mismatched dates for it.
Neither figure is an estimate of children killed. Each is a count of records the ministry states it has completed, on a register whose own stated exclusions are the subject of the next section.
Which children does the ministry state its own count leaves out?
Five classes of person, on the ministry’s own statement of 7 January 2024, which it has not withdrawn: the missing and the bodies trapped under rubble, the unidentified who reached hospitals, the unidentified whose bodies were handed over, those buried by their families without passing through a hospital, and the victims in Gaza and North Gaza after the information system stopped in November 2023.
The Gaza Ministry of Health states there the scope of its own count, rather than an outside body criticising it, and it is the most consequential document in this report for anyone reading a child figure. Four of the five exclusions turn on a body reaching a hospital or being identified there, which is the event the register is built around.
Two of them bear directly on children. A child buried by a family without passing through a hospital is outside the register by the ministry’s own rule, and the Gaza Ministry of Health publishes no estimate of how many such burials occurred. A child killed in Gaza or North Gaza after the information system stopped in November 2023 is likewise outside it, and those two governorates held 87 of the Strip’s education facilities and a substantial share of its population before the war.
The exclusions also explain the two-count structure described earlier. The daily report’s cumulative total counts arrivals at hospitals, the list counts finished records, and both sit inside the boundary the 7 January statement draws. Nothing the ministry publishes reaches past that boundary, and the ministry does not claim it does.
What the exclusions do not do is point in one direction only. They describe deaths the register cannot see, which is a statement about incompleteness rather than about accuracy, and the Gaza Ministry of Health records the boundary moving as files are completed, adding approved records by committee months afterwards. A reader weighing any child figure from this source is weighing a count of completed records inside a stated scope, published by a party to the war, and the scope statement is on the ministry’s own channel for anyone who wants to check it.
Children were 47% of Gaza’s population before the war
1,046,400 Gaza residents were children at mid-2023, 47.0% of a population of 2,226,544, on figures the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics reports as projections off the 2017 census. The Gaza Ministry of Health separately puts children at 30% of its own martyr total for 2023 to 2025.
Those two figures are set down here in the same section and never in the same arithmetic operation, because they are not comparable. The 47.0% is a pre-war share of a projected population; the 30% is a wartime share of a party’s own register. A ratio between them would be a wartime numerator divided by a pre-war projected denominator, and it would not measure anything.
Each carries its own limits, and the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics states the first set plainly. The Bureau counted 1,899,291 residents of the Gaza Strip on a reference date of 1 December 2017, the last enumeration of the territory, and the mid-2023 population is projected forward from it. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics then records a downward revision of its wartime Gaza projections of 6% to 10%, attributing the change to deaths, missing persons, reduced births and out-migration together, so the denominator underneath the 47.0% is a projection the Bureau has itself since marked as too high.
Age cut-offs differ between the Bureau’s own releases, which is worth stating because the two circulate together. The 47.0% is the share under 18; a separate release three months later gives the under-15 share as 40% and the share aged 65 and over as 3%. Both are figures the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics reports for mid-2023, and they reconcile exactly, since the 15 to 17 band between them holds 147,693 people.
The Gaza Ministry of Health states a total of 71,271 martyrs to the end of 2025 in its Health Annual Report, Palestine 2025, and gives children, women, the elderly and men as shares of it. Those percentages were read from a rendered page on which the labels and the values are not paired in the underlying text, so the figure is carried here with that caveat attached. It is, in any case, a party’s own share of a party’s own register.
Does Israel’s own investigation record carry a category defined by a child?
The Israel Defense Forces’ Military Advocate General’s Corps counts 74 criminal investigations opened as at 3 August 2024 in five categories, of which 44 concern the death of detainees and 13 alleged pillaging. None of the five is defined by the age of the person harmed, and the count is the Corps’ own, of investigations opened rather than of findings.
The remaining three categories are 8 investigations into alleged detainee mistreatment, 6 into alleged illegal use of force and 3 into alleged destruction of civilian property without military necessity. The five sum exactly to 74, so the published breakdown is complete on its own terms.
What the categories are defined by is the conduct alleged and, in the largest of them, the status of the person harmed as a detainee. Age appears in none of the five. There is therefore no line in this record that could be read as an investigation into the killing of a child as a child, and no subtotal that could be extracted as one.
The counts sit against a much larger referral figure. The Military Advocate General’s Corps states that over 1,000 incidents were identified as requiring factual assessment and referred to the General Staff’s Fact-Finding and Assessment Mechanism, with hundreds still undergoing material collection at the time of writing. The Mechanism was created during the 2014 Gaza conflict on a recommendation of the Turkel Commission and now operates as a permanent body.
The Military Advocate General’s Corps states the threshold that produces the 74, and it travels with the number. In armed conflict, it holds, death or injury to a civilian or harm to civilian objects, while tragic and regrettable, in most cases do not by themselves indicate a reasonable suspicion of criminal conduct, because they can be explained as reasonable aftermath of lawful operational activity. An investigation count is a function of that threshold, so 74 against over 1,000 is a ratio a reader can only interpret once the standard is on the page.
What does the other party publish about the age of those it counts?
The Israel Defense Forces stated at a press briefing on 29 February 2024 that it had eliminated over 13,000 people it describes as terrorists in Gaza since the war began. The figure is written as a floor, rests on the IDF’s own classification, is not independently verified, and carries no age field of any kind.
That is the whole of what the operational count says about who was killed. It is a single number with a single label attached, and the label is a characterisation the IDF applies itself rather than a verified classification. Nothing in it distinguishes an adult from a child, and no breakdown accompanies it.
The absence is not confined to that one figure. The IDF also publishes an account of the precautions it states it takes before a strike: telephone calls, text messages and leaflets warning civilians, a loud non-lethal munition fired at a roof before a building is struck, strikes aborted when civilians are present, and a numbered evacuation-area map. That account contains no counts at all. The IDF publishes no number of warnings issued, no number of roof-knocks performed and no number of strikes aborted, so the measures are described without a magnitude.
The IDF states on the same page that military infrastructure is sited in residential buildings, hospitals, mosques and schools, and that residents were told to ignore evacuation warnings. Those are a party’s stated positions about the other side’s conduct, published by that party, and they carry no figures either.
Set beside the ministry’s register, the shape of the comparison is clear enough. One party publishes a name-by-name list with a date of birth on most rows and separate child lists beside it. The other publishes a single operational total with no age field, and an account of precautions with no counts. Neither is independently verified, and the two are not two measurements of one quantity. They are two parties’ records, built for different purposes, and only one of them was built in a way that can answer a question about children at all.
Has any court registered a finding on the targeting of children?
The Israel Defense Forces’ Military Advocate General’s Corps states the threshold that produces its counts: in armed conflict, death or injury to a civilian or harm to civilian objects “in most cases do not by themselves indicate a reasonable suspicion of criminal conduct, as they can be explained as reasonable aftermath of lawful operational activity.” No court judgment in the record read here registers a finding on the targeting of children.
It is often said that Israeli forces are targeting Palestinian children, and the sentence is usually offered as a finding. What the record read here holds is a set of statements of different classes, and telling them apart is most of the work.
The Gaza Ministry of Health’s 15,613 is a party’s administrative count of completed records inside a stated scope. The Corps’ 74 is a party’s count of criminal investigations opened under a stated threshold, not of findings, indictments or convictions, and the Corps’ own count is explicitly of process rather than outcome. The IDF’s over 13,000 is a party’s operational total under a classification it applies itself. None of the three is a determination by any body outside the war about why any particular person was killed.
Bodies outside the war do hold positions on the question. A United Nations commission of inquiry reported in June 2026 and holds one; it is named here with its date and supplies no figure to this report. Positions of that kind are published characterisations of conduct, which is a fourth class of statement again, and they are not judgments of a court.
What is absent from the record read here is a register that records why. No document assembled for this report carries a field for the reason a person was killed, on either party’s side, and no adjudicated finding on the targeting of children appears in it. The intent question is therefore not answered by any of the counts in circulation, because none of the bodies producing those counts built an instrument that asks it.
Methodology
This report reads the published documents of the two parties to the war and labels each figure by the body that produced it. Every count in it is a party’s own count, self-reported and not independently verified, and that label is attached in the same sentence as the figure throughout. No independent enumeration of Gaza’s dead has been possible since the war began.
The Gaza Ministry of Health publishes the register read here. Read here are its four published lists of people whose data it states is complete, to 29 March, 30 April, 30 June and 31 August 2024; its daily statistical report; its completeness and exclusion statements of 7 January 2024, 24 July 2024 and 29 July 2024; its Director General’s statement of 23 March 2025; and its Health Annual Report, Palestine 2024 and Palestine 2025. The lists are name-by-name records published through the ministry’s own media office, which is the only venue in which they appear. The percentages in the 2025 annual report were read from a rendered page on which labels and values are not paired in the underlying text, and are carried with that caveat.
The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics publishes the pre-war population baseline. Its mid-2023 figures are projections off the census of 1 December 2017, which counted 1,899,291 residents of the Gaza Strip, and the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics records them as projections and has since revised its wartime Gaza figures downward by 6% to 10%. The pre-war child share and the wartime child share of the ministry’s register are set down in the same section and never divided into one another.
The Israeli record comes from three published sources: the Military Advocate General’s Corps page on alleged misconduct in the Gaza war, updated 3 August 2024; the IDF Spokesperson’s press briefing of 29 February 2024; and the IDF’s published account of its stated precautions and its human-shields position, which carries no counts.
Three limits bind the whole. The bodies here count different populations on different definitions over different windows, so their figures are not summed or compared. No legal instrument protecting children in armed conflict was available to this report, so no section measures conduct against a child-protection standard. And nothing assembled here records why any person was killed, which is the field a targeting question would need.
Conclusion
So which register counts the children of the Gaza Strip as children? One does. The Gaza Ministry of Health publishes children as an enumerated category with lists of their own, 15,613 of 50,021 on its register at 23 March 2025, and it is the health ministry of a party to the war reporting its own count.
Read as documents rather than as a headline, those lists carry a date of birth and no date of death, and the ministry’s own audit committee found martyrs who had been under 18 at death registered months afterwards. The Health Annual Report records a child count to one date beside totals to two later ones, and publishes three categories that sum to a little over half the total with no men’s category among them. The Gaza Ministry of Health stated on 7 January 2024 five classes of person the register does not reach, including children buried by their families and everyone in two northern governorates after the information system stopped. The other party’s records answer the age question not at all: 74 investigations in five categories, none defined by age, and an operational total of over 13,000 with no age field and no breakdown.
Neither record was built to answer the question the public asks of it. A register of completed administrative records answers how many; a count of investigations opened under a stated threshold answers how many files; an operational total under a party’s own classification answers neither. The reason a person was killed is a field that exists in no document read here, on either side.
Which leaves a plain thing to sit with. The most-cited answer to a question about children rests on the paperwork of the two sides that fought, one of which enumerates children and one of which does not record age at all, and the field that would settle what anyone intended has never been written down by anybody. What is a public supposed to do with a question whose answer was never recorded?
Frequently Asked Questions
Who publishes the name-by-name lists of the dead in Gaza?
The Gaza Ministry of Health, through its own media office channel, which is the only venue in which the lists appear. Its own website has published no file since October 2023. Each round is a list of people the ministry states have complete data, and every figure in it is a party’s own count, not independently verified.
What is the difference between the ministry’s daily total and its published list?
The daily statistical report gives a cumulative total of everyone who reached a hospital; the list counts only the records the ministry has finished. The Gaza Ministry of Health stated both on 24 July 2024: 28,185 with complete data and 9,715 whose data was not yet complete. The two are different quantities and are not subtracted from one another.
Does the ministry record whether a death was caused by a strike, a shooting or something else?
No such field appears in any published round of the list. The columns are a serial number, a name, an identity or document number, sex, age, and on three of the four rounds a date of birth and a provenance marker. Cause and circumstance are not among them.
Why do the ministry’s child figures differ between its own documents?
They are stated to different dates against different totals. The 15,613 of March 2025 is given against a register total of 50,021 at the same date; the 13,319 in the Health Annual Report, Palestine 2024 is stated to 7 October 2024 against totals recorded on 11 December and 31 December 2024.
How many children lived in Gaza before the war?
The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics reports 1,046,400 residents under 18 at mid-2023, 47.0% of a projected population of 2,226,544. Both are projections off the 2017 census rather than counts, and the Bureau has since revised its wartime Gaza population figures downward by 6% to 10%.
Has Israel opened any investigation defined by the age of the person harmed?
None appears in the published record. The Military Advocate General’s Corps counts 74 criminal investigations in five categories, defined by the conduct alleged and, in the largest, by the status of the person as a detainee. The Corps’ own count is of investigations opened, not of findings.
Does the IDF publish how many warnings it issued before strikes?
The IDF publishes none. Its account of stated precautions describes telephone calls, text messages, leaflets, roof-knocks, aborted strikes and a numbered evacuation map, and attaches no count to any of them. The measures are described by a party to the war without a magnitude.
What would a record have to contain to answer the targeting question?
A field recording why each person was killed, and a body outside the war able to fill it. No document read for this report carries such a field on either side, so the counts in circulation answer how many and under what threshold a file was opened, and nothing about intent.
Sources
- Israel Defense Forces, 2024. Press Briefing by IDF Spokesperson, February 29th, 2024. idf.il. Official record, self-reported by a party to the conflict.
- Israel Defense Forces, no date. Stated precautions in Gaza and the human-shields position: evacuation-zone publications and the human-shields materials. idf.il. Official record, a party’s own stated account of its own conduct; it publishes no counts.
- Military Advocate General’s Corps, Israel Defense Forces, 2024. Addressing Alleged Misconduct in the Context of the War in Gaza, published 24 February 2024, updated 3 August 2024. idf.il. Official record, the party’s own reported counts of its own processes.
- Ministry of Health, Gaza, 2024. Published martyr lists to 29 March, 30 April, 30 June and 31 August 2024; the daily statistical report; and the completeness and exclusion statements of 7 January, 24 July and 29 July 2024, published through the ministry’s media office channel. t.me/MOHMediaGaza. Official record, a party to the war reporting its own count, self-reported and not independently verified.
- Ministry of Health, Gaza, 2025. Statement of the ministry’s Director General of 23 March 2025 on the composition of the register, and the record additions of 23 March and 30 August 2025; with Health Annual Report, Palestine 2024, section 1.1. t.me/MOHMediaGaza and site.moh.ps. Official record, a party’s own reported counts.
- Ministry of Health, Gaza, 2026. Health Annual Report, Palestine 2025, Graph (2), and the daily statistical report of 10 September 2026. site.moh.ps and t.me/MOHMediaGaza. Official record, a party’s own reported counts; the percentages were read from a rendered page on which labels and values are unpaired.
- Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2018. Population, Housing and Establishments Census 2017, final results. Ramallah. pcbs.gov.ps. Official record, national census.
- Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2023. Palestinian Child Day release, 5 April 2023, and the World Population Day release, 11 July 2023, with the Bureau’s mid-year population estimates for the Gaza Strip. pcbs.gov.ps. Official record, a national statistical office; the mid-2023 figures are the Bureau’s own projections off the 2017 census.