What Does the Gaza Health Ministry Publish About Its Own Count? Reading the Four Lists, the Daily Report and the Ministry’s Own Statements

The Ministry of Health in Gaza published 21,323 records over 454 pages in the first of four name-by-name lists of the dead, and none of the four carries a column for the date of death. The same ministry publishes a provenance label on every record, a count of its own unfinished portion, and five categories of death it states it does not count at all. Its own arithmetic does not close: the two counts it published for 30 June 2024 add to the total it published the next morning, not to that day’s.

Key Findings

• The Ministry of Health in Gaza published 21,323 records over 454 pages in its list of martyrs with complete data to 29 March 2024, rising through three later rounds to 34,344 records over 649 pages to 31 August 2024, each the ministry’s own count and not independently verified.
• None of the four lists carries a column for the date of death: the Ministry of Health publishes serial number, name, identity or document number, date of birth, sex, age and source, read directly on 10 September 2026.
• On its own provenance column, the Ministry of Health labelled 22,368 of the 28,185 records in its list to 30 June 2024 as taken from ministry records and 5,817 as entered on a relative’s notification.
• The Ministry of Health published 28,185 records with complete data alongside 9,715 whose data was not yet complete at 30 June 2024, its own two counts on its own stated definitions.
• The 1.5% to 3.8% accuracy range quoted for the ministry’s earlier counts appears in a Lancet correspondence letter (Huynh, Chin and Spiegel, 2024) in a sentence carrying no reference marker, and that letter’s own measurement covers 35 days of 2023.

Which documents carry the ministry’s own name-by-name record?

The Ministry of Health in Gaza published 21,323 records over 454 pages in its name-by-name list of martyrs with complete data to 29 March 2024, posted on 3 April 2024 through the ministry’s own media office channel. It is the first of four such documents, and it is the ministry’s own count.

Source: Ministry of Health, Gaza, the four list documents published through its media office channel, read on 10 September 2026. Each is the ministry’s own count, self-reported by a health ministry under the authority governing Gaza and not independently verified.

The March file closes on a footnote stating its own coverage cut-offs. For martyrs registered in its own records, the Ministry of Health reported coverage of Gaza up to 10 November 2023 and of the south up to 29 March 2024, with one hospital covered only to 14 February 2024. So it is not a file of everyone who died by its closing date, but of everyone whose record the ministry had finished, where its recording system still reached.

Alongside the combined file the Ministry of Health published four category lists for the round to 30 April 2024, covering children, women, the elderly and the orphans of martyrs, each posted the same day. These are lists of named individuals, published by a party to the war, and the record counts are counts of completed files rather than of deaths: the ministry publishes a separate cumulative total in a daily statistical report, built to a different definition.

Do the ministry’s lists record a date of death?

Seven columns appear on the ministry’s list to 29 March 2024, and none of them records a date of death: the Ministry of Health published serial number, name, identity number, date of birth, sex, age and source. The Arabic heading for date of martyrdom appears in no column of any of the four documents, read directly on 10 September 2026.

The schema is not stable across rounds. In the list to 30 April 2024, of 24,682 records over 498 pages, the Ministry of Health published six columns rather than seven: it dropped date of birth and dropped the source column altogether, and added an address. The lists to 30 June and 31 August 2024 return to seven columns, but the identity field changes heading between rounds, published as the identity number in March and as the document number in June and August.

The date field that does appear behaves differently by stratum inside a single document. In the March file, records labelled as taken from ministry records show full dates, while records labelled as entered on a relative’s notification show two-digit years with dashes. In the August file the oldest decedents carry two-digit years a reader can resolve only against the age column beside them, so a person recorded at 101 carries a birth year that reads on its face as a date four years in the future.

The consequence is narrow and it is the point. A reader holding all four documents can count the records and read the name, identity number, age and sex the Ministry of Health recorded against each. That reader cannot date a single death from the file, cannot build a daily or weekly series from it, and cannot check any dated claim about the pace of deaths against it.

Where does the ministry say each record came from?

22,368 of the 28,185 records in the list to 30 June 2024 are labelled as taken from ministry records, and 5,817 as entered on a relative’s notification, in a provenance column the Ministry of Health publishes on the file itself.

The same column appears on the earlier file, where the Ministry of Health split 21,323 records into 18,845 taken from ministry records and 2,478 entered on a relative’s notification. Both splits close exactly against their own totals, which is small but checkable: the two labels are exhaustive within each file, so every record the ministry publishes is assigned one of two provenances and none to neither.

Between the two files the composition moves. On the printed counts, records entered on a relative’s notification are 11.6% of the March file and 20.6% of the June file, so the later document rests proportionally more on reports from families. That is a shift in how the file was assembled, and the Ministry of Health published no statement of why it moved.

The column matters because it is unusual. A registry that publishes only a total tells a reader nothing about how any entry got in. This one labels each record with the route by which it entered, so a reader can ask the two different questions those routes raise, one about a hospital record system operating under war conditions and one about a family’s report. The ministry publishes the distinction. It publishes no assessment of either route’s accuracy, and neither has been independently checked.

How much of its own file does the ministry call incomplete?

The Ministry of Health published 28,185 records with complete data and 9,715 whose data was not yet complete at 30 June 2024, its own two counts on its own stated definitions: everyone who reached the hospitals, against everyone whose file it has finished.

Both figures come from a statement the Ministry of Health published on 24 July 2024, the same day it posted the list to 30 June. That statement defines the pair as well as printing it: the general martyr count is everyone who reached the hospitals, and the complete-data count is everyone whose data the ministry has finished processing. So the issuing body published, in one document, the size of its own unfinished portion and the definition producing it.

A second pair of figures circulates widely as the ministry’s statement about incomplete records: 12,263 and 11,371, often set against a total of 33,091. Neither figure appears in any ministry document located on 10 September 2026. What the Ministry of Health did publish that week is the list of 21,323 completed records posted on 3 April 2024, covering deaths to 29 March, and cumulative totals of 33,091 in its daily statistical report of 5 April 2024 and 33,137 on 6 April.

That absence carries a retrieval limit rather than a conclusion. The ministry posts a daily emergency report as a separate document through the same media office channel, and that channel serves message text to an automated reader but serves no file, so the pair is recorded here as absent from every ministry document that could be read.

Which deaths does the ministry say it does not count?

Five categories of death are excluded from the ministry’s count by a statement the Ministry of Health published on 7 January 2024 and has never withdrawn: the missing and those under rubble, the unidentified who reached hospitals, the unidentified whose bodies Israel returned, those buried by their families without passing through a hospital, and deaths in Gaza and North Gaza after the information system stopped in November 2023.

It is a scope statement, published by the issuing body about its own instrument, and it is dated early. The Ministry of Health issued it three months into the war, and nothing it has published since withdraws or narrows it.

Each exclusion removes a different population. The first removes those whose bodies were never recovered, the category most often argued about and the one the ministry declines to estimate. The second and third remove the unidentified, whether they reached a hospital or were returned, so that exclusion is about identification rather than recovery. The fourth removes those buried directly by families, which where hospitals were not reachable is not a rare route. The fifth is geographic and temporal at once, removing deaths in two northern governorates after the point at which the ministry states its information system stopped.

Read together, the statement fixes what the published figure is a count of. It is not a count of the dead, and the Ministry of Health does not present it as one. It is a count of deaths that reached a functioning recording system and were identified in it. Any figure taken from the ministry carries that boundary in either direction: a reader treating the total as a count of everyone killed is using it for something the issuing body says it does not do, and a reader treating the exclusions as evidence of the total’s accuracy is doing the same in reverse.

Why do the list and the daily total not subtract?

The ministry’s two counts for 30 June 2024 add to 37,900, which is the cumulative total the Ministry of Health published the next morning rather than the 37,877 it published for 30 June itself. A reader who subtracts the list from the same day’s total gets 9,692, a figure the ministry has never published.

The three numbers come from three documents published within four weeks of each other. The daily statistical report for 30 June 2024 records 37,877 martyrs and 86,969 injuries; the report for 1 July records 37,900 and 87,060; and the completeness statement of 24 July gives 28,185 records with complete data and 9,715 not yet complete, both stated as of 30 June.

The mismatch is twenty-three records, and nothing the Ministry of Health published reconciles it. Two readings are available from the documents alone and neither is confirmed by them. The completeness pair may have been assembled on 1 July and dated to the previous day’s close. Or the unfinished count may have been computed against a total already updated.

What follows is a rule about reading rather than a finding about the ministry. Two series a reader instinctively treats as parts of one whole are not built to subtract. The cumulative total counts everyone who reached the hospitals, on the ministry’s own definition; the list counts everyone whose record it has finished; and the Ministry of Health adds to the cumulative figure by administrative approval months after the fact. Anyone who takes the day’s total, subtracts the day’s list, and presents the remainder as the number of unidentified dead has produced a figure the issuing body did not publish, in a subtraction that looks reasonable until the two definitions are read side by side.

How did the ministry record the date each death occurred?

The date of death was registered either on the family’s report or on the date the body reached the hospital, the Ministry of Health stated on 29 July 2024, and a committee it formed to audit the actual date found that a number of decedents had been under 18 at death while being registered several months later.

That statement is the issuing body’s own account of its registration practice, published six days after the completeness statement, and it describes a two-route procedure mapping onto the two labels in the provenance column. A record entered from the ministry’s own files carries the date the body arrived at a hospital. A record entered on a relative’s notification carries the date the family reported it. Neither is necessarily the date the person died.

The audit committee’s finding is the concrete illustration the Ministry of Health itself supplies. Decedents who had been under 18 when they died were registered months later, by which point the age recorded against them no longer matched their age at death. That is a specific, dated statement by the issuing body that the interval between death and registration was, in some cases, measured in months.

Two consequences follow, and both are about what can be built from the file rather than whether it is right. The lists carry a date of birth and no date of death, so nothing published anchors a record to a day. And where a date exists inside the ministry’s internal registration, it is a date of arrival or a date of report, so a series built from it would measure when deaths entered the system rather than when they occurred. The Ministry of Health published the practice and the audit, and no reconstruction of actual dates of death.

Do records enter the total without a new death?

233 records entered the ministry’s cumulative total on 23 March 2025 and 280 on 30 August 2025 without a new death behind them, described by the Ministry of Health as records completed and approved by its judicial committee following the notifications and missing-persons file. A further 160 were added during August 2026.

Each addition is announced in the same message that carries the day’s cumulative figure, and each is attributed to a committee rather than to an event. The Ministry of Health credited the 2025 additions to a judicial committee working through the notifications and missing-persons file, and the August 2026 addition to a martyrs’ approval committee. It reported 50,021 martyrs on 23 March 2025 and 73,670 in its daily report of 10 September 2026.

The mechanism is disclosed, which is the point. A cumulative series rising only by new deaths would be a running tally of events. This one rises by two routes: deaths newly reported, and older files completed and approved. The Ministry of Health publishes when the second route contributed and how much it contributed that day.

What is not published is the same disclosure for every day. The ministry names administrative additions in individual statements rather than maintaining a published column separating the two routes across the series, so the separation can be made where it announced one and not elsewhere. A day-to-day change in the cumulative figure therefore cannot be read as a count of deaths that day.

Does a second publication check the count, or repeat it?

71,271 martyrs and 171,233 injured to the end of 2025 appear in the Health Annual Report, Palestine 2025, published by the Ministry of Health in Ramallah, whose Gaza section states that it rests on reports issued by the ministry and its partners together with a health resources monitoring system.

That sentence settles what the annual report is. It is a second ministry publication carrying the same underlying count, not a second body checking it, and the report states so in its own methods note. The 2025 edition reports 25,718 martyrs and 62,854 injuries for that year alone. How other bodies carry this count is set out in the report on the counts each body publishes.

The 2024 edition carries a dating artefact visible from the ministry’s own daily series. It reports 45,553 martyrs for a period stated as ending 31 December 2024. That figure is the number the Ministry of Health published in its daily statistical report of 1 January 2025; its own figure for 30 December 2024 is 45,541, and it issued no daily report on 31 December. So a period-end total in the annual report is the next morning’s daily figure, the same one-day slip that appears between the completeness pair and the 30 June total.

The 2024 edition also publishes category counts whose denominators do not match the total beside them. The Ministry of Health reported 13,319 child martyrs with complete data to 7 October 2024, alongside 7,216 female, 3,447 elderly and 1,057 healthcare-worker martyrs on the same cut-off, and set them beside 43,587 martyrs with complete data at 11 December 2024 and a total of 45,553 to 31 December. Dividing any category count into either total gives a share of a base two to three months later than the numerator, and the four categories partition nothing: they sum to 25,039 with no men’s category published and the healthcare-worker count overlapping the rest.

Where does the quoted 1.5% to 3.8% accuracy range come from?

The sentence carrying the 1.5% to 3.8% accuracy range quoted for the ministry’s earlier counts has no reference marker in either the full text or the typeset PDF of the Lancet correspondence that prints it (Huynh, Chin and Spiegel, 2024), which is editorially reviewed correspondence rather than a peer-reviewed study.

The reference markers in that passage sit on the sentences either side of it. One closes the preceding sentence about political scepticism, and one closes the following sentence, about a separate 8.0% discrepancy for the 2014 war. The range itself is presented as a bare assertion in a journal.

The arithmetic behind it is nonetheless reproducible, and it reproduces on one denominator only. The Ministry of Health counted 1,440 dead in 2008 and 260 in 2021. A difference of 55 against the 1,440 prints as 3.8%, and a difference of 4 against the 260 prints as 1.5%. Taking the other body’s figure as denominator instead gives 4.0% and 1.6%, which are not the published numbers, so the range is a share of the ministry’s own count in both cases.

The paired figures come from an explainer the Associated Press published on 26 October 2023, carrying three dated pairs of ministry and United Nations humanitarian office tolls, for 2008, 2014 and 2021, and carrying no percentage at all. Two further properties follow from reading it. The 2014 pair falls at 2.55% and appears nowhere in the published range, so it is the interior rather than an endpoint, and the endpoints are 2021 and 2008. And the November 2012 conflict is absent from the explainer entirely, so the phrase covers three earlier conflicts rather than every one of them.

What did that Lancet letter actually measure?

11,078 Gazan deaths over 35 days, 7 October to 10 November 2023, is the entire measurement the Lancet letter reports (Huynh, Chin and Spiegel, 2024), and it states in its own text that mortality might have been under-reported by the ministry because of decreased capacity.

The letter’s own data statement scopes its data to October and November 2023. The authors compared cumulative reported deaths of Gazan residents against cumulative reported staff deaths at a United Nations relief agency over the same 35 days, and reported the resulting rates as 5.3 deaths per 1,000 against 7.8 per 1,000. Those are two rates over two different populations, one the residents of Gaza and one the agency’s Gaza staff, and the inference drawn is that the second exceeding the first is inconsistent with inflation of the first.

Two sentences bound what the letter claims. It states that during the period “mortality might have been under-reported by the Gaza MoH due to decreased capacity,” and it states that “difficulties obtaining accurate mortality figures should not be interpreted as intentionally misreported data.” The first points the opposite way from inflation; the second declines to read difficulty as intent.

The title is an absence claim, not a verification. “No evidence of inflated mortality reporting” is a statement about what the authors did not find in a 35-day window of 2023, and the letter measures no earlier conflict. Its status is part of the record too: it appears in the journal’s correspondence section, editorially reviewed rather than peer-reviewed, and the biomedical index carries no abstract for it. The most-quoted sentence about the ministry’s historical accuracy and the letter’s own measurement are two different things.

Has any study compared a pre-2023 ministry count with another body’s?

No peer-reviewed study comparing a pre-2023 ministry count with another body’s count was located in a recorded search of the biomedical and preprint paper index and of the open web on 10 September 2026. The nearest item, Vaktskjold and colleagues (2016), counts non-war deaths in Gaza and runs no count against any other body’s.

The search ran two framings against the paper index, returning thirty results, and a further pass over the open web. The absence is recorded as the result of that search rather than asserted as a fact about the literature, which is the only form the claim can honestly take.

What the nearest item measures is worth stating precisely, because its subject is adjacent and its method is not the one required. Vaktskjold and colleagues published a chart review in the peer-reviewed journal Conflict and Health covering mortality in Gaza outside the war deaths, and recorded 1,241 deaths in July to September 2014 against 1,232 in the same months of 2013 (Vaktskjold and colleagues, 2016). It is a review of clinical records against clinical records within one system, and it sets no ministry count against any other body’s count, which is the comparison the widely quoted accuracy range asserts has been made.

Studies of the current war do exist and are frequently cited, and none fills this gap either, because each measures the war since October 2023 rather than an earlier one. The consequence is checkable. A reader who wants to know whether the ministry’s counts in 2008, 2012, 2014 or 2021 matched another body’s counts has, in the published literature, the raw pairs the Associated Press printed and one uncited sentence in a correspondence letter.

Methodology and limitations

This report reads what the Ministry of Health in Gaza publishes about its own count, dates each document, and states what each one measures. It makes no mortality estimate.

Five kinds of record appear. The issuing body’s own publications: four name-by-name list documents of 2024, the daily statistical reports, and dated statements of 7 January, 24 July and 29 July 2024 and of 23 March 2025, 30 August 2025 and August 2026, all published through the ministry’s media office channel. A second ministry voice: the Health Annual Report, Palestine for 2024 and 2025, published in Ramallah. A journal correspondence letter, editorially reviewed and not peer-reviewed. An international press explainer, used as the relay for figures it prints from other bodies. And a national statistical office brief, used only where it states what it took from the ministry rather than measured.

Every figure attributed to the ministry here is that ministry’s own count, published by a health ministry under the authority governing Gaza, and none of it has been independently verified. The same label binds the annual reports, which carry the same underlying count under a different masthead.

Four limits bear on the reading. The ministry’s own website has published no file since 21 October 2023, so the lists and daily reports reach a reader only through its media office channel, which serves message text but no file to an automated reader; the pair widely attributed to the ministry as its incomplete-records statement, 12,263 and 11,371, is therefore recorded above as absent from every ministry document readable on 10 September 2026 rather than traced to an origin. Arithmetic performed on the published figures, including the two provenance shares and the twenty-three-record mismatch, is a derivation from the printed counts. The Ministry of Health publishes no combatant or noncombatant classification. And the registry carries no population denominator of its own. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics counted 1,899,291 residents of Gaza in the 2017 census, the last measured base, and projected 2,226,544 residents at mid-2023, of whom 47%, or 1,046,400, were under 18. A ministry count set against a Gaza population therefore runs a wartime numerator against a pre-war projection.

Conclusion

So what does the Gaza Ministry of Health actually publish about its own count? A great deal, and most of it is about the instrument rather than the number. It publishes the columns it keeps and the one it does not, in four dated documents reaching 34,344 records by 31 August 2024. It publishes a provenance label on every record, splitting the file to 30 June 2024 into 22,368 taken from its own records and 5,817 entered by relatives. It publishes the size of its unfinished portion, 9,715 at that date, and the definition producing it. It publishes, and has never withdrawn, five categories of death it says it leaves out. And it publishes the administrative route by which old files enter a cumulative total months after the event.

Set against that, the accuracy figure quoted most often in public argument is a single sentence with no citation, in a letter whose own measurement is 35 days long, resting on three pairs of numbers a news agency printed with no percentage attached, reproducing only when the ministry’s own count is the denominator. The comparison it asserts has never been carried out as a study, and the two figures most often offered as the ministry’s admission of incomplete data appear in none of its documents.

There is something odd in that arrangement. A party to the war has published the seams in its own instrument, in dated statements anyone can open, and the argument about whether to believe it runs almost entirely on material the ministry never published. When a number becomes the thing people fight over, does anything about the machinery that produced it travel with it?

Frequently Asked Questions

Where does the Gaza health ministry publish its casualty documents?

Through its media office channel, where the four list documents, the daily statistical reports and the dated statements all appear. The ministry’s own website has published no file since 21 October 2023, so no fatality list sits on a government web host.

Does the ministry publish a combatant or civilian breakdown?

No. It publishes age and sex categories instead: the Health Annual Report, Palestine 2025 reports children 30%, women 16%, elderly 7% and men 47% of martyrs for 2023 to 2025, on the ministry’s own classification.

What cumulative total does the ministry report most recently?

73,670 martyrs and 174,682 injuries, in the daily statistical report the Ministry of Health published on 10 September 2026. The same report records 1,359 martyrs and 4,571 injuries since the ceasefire that began on 11 October, and 831 bodies recovered from the rubble.

Which other publications carry the ministry’s figure?

The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics reported 70,942 deaths in Gaza to the end of December 2025, attributing that figure to the ministry rather than measuring it. The Costs of War project put the toll at 67,075 killed as of 3 October 2025, taken from a United Nations dashboard relaying the same ministry count (Crawford, 2025).

What has the ministry published about child deaths?

Its Director General reported 15,613 children among the 50,021 martyrs recorded on 23 March 2025, of whom 872 had not completed their first year, alongside 247 children born and killed during the war. An earlier statement of 13 August 2024 put the number of infants born and killed at 115.

Does the ministry’s registry have a population denominator?

No. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics counted 1,899,291 residents of the Strip in the 2017 census, the last measured base, and puts Gaza at about 2.13 million at the end of 2025, an estimate rather than an enumeration.

Sources

• Associated Press, 2023. What is Gaza’s Ministry of Health and how does it calculate the war’s death toll? 26 October 2023, updated 6 November 2023. apnews.com. International press, relaying tolls published by other bodies.
• Crawford, 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/paper/HumanTollGaza. University research project report, not peer-reviewed.
• Gaza Ministry of Health, 2024. Lists of martyrs with complete data to 29 March, 30 April, 30 June and 31 August 2024; daily statistical reports; and statements of 7 January, 24 July and 29 July 2024, published through the ministry’s media office channel. Official record, self-reported by a party to the war, not independently verified.
• Gaza Ministry of Health, 2025. Daily statistical reports and the judicial-committee approval statements of 23 March and 30 August 2025. Official record, self-reported by a party to the war, not independently verified.
• Gaza Ministry of Health, 2026. Daily statistical report of 10 September 2026 and the martyrs’ approval committee addition of August 2026. Official record, self-reported by a party to the war, not independently verified.
• Huynh, Chin and Spiegel, 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. Correspondence, editorially reviewed, not peer-reviewed.
• Ministry of Health, Ramallah, 2025. Health Annual Report, Palestine 2024. site.moh.ps. Official record, self-reported, not independently verified.
• Ministry of Health, Ramallah, 2026. Health Annual Report, Palestine 2025. site.moh.ps. Official record, self-reported, not independently verified.
• Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2018. Population, Housing and Establishments Census 2017, final results. pcbs.gov.ps. Official record.
• Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2023. Population and age-structure estimates for the Gaza Strip at mid-2023, published in the Bureau’s indicator tables and its World Population Day and Palestinian Child Day releases. pcbs.gov.ps. Official record, projected from the 2017 census rather than enumerated.
• Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2025. A Brief on the Status of the Palestinian People at the End of 2025. pcbs.gov.ps. Official record.
• Vaktskjold and colleagues, 2016. Conflict and Health. DOI 10.1186/s13031-016-0077-6. Peer-reviewed journal. A chart review of non-war mortality in the Gaza Strip, July to September 2014.