Children are 30% of the dead and women 16%, on the breakdown the Gaza Ministry of Health published in its own Health Annual Report, Palestine 2025, against a stated total of 71,271 martyrs to the end of 2025. That share belongs to one document rather than to the war, because the Gaza Ministry of Health publishes two quantities that are read as one: a daily cumulative total of everyone who reached a hospital, which records deaths and injuries and carries no sex field and no age field at all, and a periodic name-by-name list of only those records whose data it has finished. Sex and age exist on the second document alone. Between the round covering deaths to 29 March 2024 and the round covering deaths to 31 August 2024, that document grew from 21,323 records to 34,344, and its column set changed twice inside the same stretch.
Key Findings
- The Gaza Ministry of Health states its own two counts in the same post: 28,185 records with complete data against 9,715 whose data was not yet complete, as of 30 June 2024, a party to the war reporting on its own record (statement of 24 July 2024).
- The named list to 30 June 2024 records seven columns including sex and age. The Gaza Ministry of Health’s daily statistical report for the same date records two quantities, 37,877 martyrs and 86,969 injuries, and no sex or age field at all (Ministry of Health, Gaza, 2024).
- The named list grew 61% in five months, from 21,323 records covering deaths to 29 March 2024 to 34,344 covering deaths to 31 August 2024, across four documents the Gaza Ministry of Health published itself.
- Children 30%, Women 16%, Elderly 7% and Men 47%: the issuing ministry’s own published shares for 2023 to 2025, against a stated total of 71,271 martyrs and 171,233 injured (Ministry of Health, Health Annual Report, Palestine 2025).
- The Gaza Ministry of Health’s own media library holds 2,536 PDFs, the newest dated 21 October 2023, and none of them is a casualty list; the four list documents sit on no government web host (retrieval record of 10 September 2026).
What two counts does the Gaza health ministry publish?
28,185 records with complete data against 9,715 whose data was not yet complete, as of 30 June 2024, is how the Gaza Ministry of Health described its own record in the post that published the list, on 24 July 2024. The same post defines both: the general martyr count is everyone who reached the hospitals, and the complete-data count is everyone whose data the ministry has finished.
Those are two instruments, not one number in two states. The first is a running cumulative total published daily, and it is the quantity that travels onward. Crawford (2025), a Costs of War project report at Brown University’s Watson School and not peer-reviewed, put 67,075 killed and 169,430 injured in Gaza as of 3 October 2025, taken from the Gaza Ministry of Health’s figures by way of a United Nations casualty dashboard, and that paper collects no casualty data of its own. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, the national statistical office, likewise reported 70,942 deaths in Gaza by the end of December 2025 and attributed them to the ministry rather than measuring them itself (PCBS, 2025).
Every one of those is a pair of quantities, dead and injured. None of them carries a name, a sex or an age, because the document they come from holds no such fields.
The second instrument does hold them. It is a periodic list published as a PDF running to hundreds of pages, one row per record, covering only the records the Gaza Ministry of Health has finished processing. That is the document from which any share of women or children can be computed, and it is roughly three quarters the size of the total published beside it.
The Gaza Ministry of Health also documented what its list leaves out, in a statement of 7 January 2024 it has never withdrawn: the missing and the bodies under rubble are not counted, nor the unidentified who reached hospitals, nor the unidentified whose bodies were handed back, nor those buried by their families without passing through a hospital, nor the victims in Gaza and North Gaza after the information system stopped in November 2023. That is the issuing body’s own scope statement, published alongside its own figures.
Which of the ministry’s records carries a sex and an age?
Seven columns carry the list to 30 June 2024: serial number, name, document number, date of birth, sex, age and source, on a direct read of the 532-page document on 10 September 2026. The Gaza Ministry of Health’s daily statistical report for that same date records two quantities, 37,877 martyrs and 86,969 injuries, and no sex field and no age field of any kind.
The asymmetry is the whole mechanism. A cumulative total is a pair of running integers. It can rise, it can be revised, and it can be relayed onward, but nothing in its structure can be sorted by age or by sex, because neither attribute is recorded in it. The list is a different object: 28,185 rows at that date, each with a sex value and an age value, and it is the only ministry publication from which a demographic share can be derived at all.
The seventh column names where each record came from. On the 30 June round, 22,368 rows are labelled as ministry records and 5,817 as notification by the martyrs’ relatives, and those two strata sum to 28,185 exactly. Jamaluddine and colleagues (2025) describe the same two input lists in The Lancet for the identical window, the hospital morgue records and the rolling online mortality survey the ministry launched on 1 January 2024, in a peer-reviewed capture-recapture analysis built on them.
That lock matters for any reader weighing the two documents against each other. The named list and the statistical test of it are not independent readings of the same population; the second was constructed from the first.
What the list does not carry is any combatant or non-combatant field. The Gaza Ministry of Health publishes no such breakdown in any of the four documents read, so the only demographic partition its own record supports is by sex and by age.
How much did the named list grow between the April and July rounds?
The list grew 61% in five months, from 21,323 records covering deaths to 29 March 2024 to 34,344 covering deaths to 31 August 2024, across four documents the Gaza Ministry of Health published itself and this report read directly on 10 September 2026.
The rounds in between are the ones the question turns on. The round posted on 5 May 2024 covers deaths to 30 April and holds 24,682 records across 498 pages. The round posted on 24 July 2024 covers deaths to 30 June and holds 28,185 across 532 pages. Between the two, the base on which any share would be computed rose by 3,503 records, or 14%.
Growth of that size inside five months is not only new deaths entering a register. The Gaza Ministry of Health also counted 233 records onto its cumulative total on 23 March 2025 and 280 on 30 August 2025 by administrative approval, described as records completed and approved by a judicial committee following the notifications and missing-persons file, with 160 more during August 2026 attributed to a martyrs’ approval committee.
The consequence for a demographic share is arithmetic rather than interpretive. A share computed from the April round and a share computed from the July round divide into denominators 3,503 records apart, and a share computed from the March round divides into a base 13,021 records smaller than the August one. The ministry published each list as a snapshot of what it had finished at that date, which is exactly what makes the base move.
Did the ministry change what its list records between rounds?
Six columns appear in the round posted on 5 May 2024, against seven in the rounds either side of it. The Gaza Ministry of Health’s list to 30 April 2024 drops both date of birth and the source column and adds an address, on a direct read of all four documents on 10 September 2026.
| List round | Columns per record | What the round drops or adds |
|---|---|---|
| To 29 March 2024 | 7 | Date of birth and a source column, no address |
| To 30 April 2024 | 6 | Drops date of birth and source, adds an address |
| To 30 June 2024 | 7 | Date of birth and source restored, no address |
| To 31 August 2024 | 7 | The same seven columns as the June round |
Source: Ministry of Health, Gaza, 2024, the four published list documents, read directly on 10 September 2026. The issuing ministry’s own records, self-reported and not independently verified.
The identity field is renamed as well. It is headed الهوية, the identity number, in the March round, and ر.الوثيقة, the document number, in the rounds from April onward. A reader matching records across rounds is therefore matching on a field whose definition the publisher changed mid-series.
Date formats differ by source stratum inside a single document. In the March round, rows labelled as ministry records show full dates such as 30/03/1993, while rows labelled as family notification show two-digit years with dashes, such as 13-02-97. In the August round the oldest decedents carry 01-01-27, 01-01-24 and 01-01-22 against ages of 97, 100 and 101, which any mechanical parser reads as years in the 2020s.
Sex survives all four rounds; date of birth does not. So the one field a women-and-children share depends on is stable across the series, and the field that would let a reader check an age independently is present in three rounds out of four.
What share of the dead does the ministry itself report as children?
Children are 30% of martyrs and women 16%, for 2023 to 2025, on the Gaza Ministry of Health’s own published breakdown in its Health Annual Report, Palestine 2025. Women and children together are 46% on the issuing ministry’s own published shares, a party to the war reporting on its own count.
The remaining two categories in the same graph are Elderly at 7% and Men at 47%, and the four sum to the whole. The report states a total of 71,271 martyrs and 171,233 injured to the end of 2025, of which 25,718 martyrs and 62,854 injuries fall in 2025 alone.
Two things about that graph travel with the figure. Its own heading misspells the word as Percentge, and the four values and four labels come off the rendered page rather than the text layer, which returns them unpaired. The pairing above is read from the drawn chart.
The Ministry of Health published that annual report from Ramallah, and its Gaza section states plainly that it rests on reports issued by the ministry and its partners together with the health-resources monitoring system. It is a second ministry voice on the same underlying count, not an outside check on it.
That is the figure the issuing body itself publishes, in its own annual report, under its own name, with its own denominator printed on the same page. Any share derived from the named lists instead would be a share of a different and smaller document, on a base that moved by a third in five months.
Why do the ministry’s own two annual reports give different shares?
13,319 child martyrs with complete data to 7 October 2024 is what the Ministry of Health recorded in its Health Annual Report, Palestine 2024, and that report publishes no children’s share anywhere. The total beside it, 43,587 with complete data, is dated 11 December 2024, so any share a reader computes divides a numerator into a base more than two months later.
The other categories in section 1.1 carry the same date stamp: 7,216 female martyrs, 3,447 elderly and 1,057 healthcare workers, all stated with complete data to 7 October 2024. The report’s second total, 45,553, covers 7 October 2023 to 31 December 2024.
Those categories partition nothing. The three demographic ones sum to 23,982 with no men’s category published anywhere in the section, and the healthcare-worker count overlaps all three, since a healthcare worker may be female, elderly or both. A bar chart is the honest shape for them precisely because they are not parts of one whole.
The denominators carry a further wrinkle the report does not flag. Its 45,553 martyrs and 108,379 injuries for 7 October 2023 to 31 December 2024 are exactly the figures the Gaza Ministry of Health published in its daily report of 1 January 2025, and its own 30 December 2024 figure is 45,541. No daily report was issued on 31 December 2024.
So the 2024 report supplies counts without a comparable base, and the 2025 report supplies shares without the counts behind them. Neither can be converted into the other, and the Ministry of Health has published no reconciliation between them.
How many children does the ministry’s own count record?
15,613 children of the 50,021 martyrs the Gaza Ministry of Health reported at 23 March 2025 is what the ministry’s own Director General stated that day, a party to the war reporting on its own count. Of those children, 872 had not completed their first year and 247 were born and killed during the war.
The office is what is cited here, not the person; the Institute reports aggregates and does not name individuals.
The 50,021 is the cumulative daily-report figure for that date, the first of the ministry’s two instruments. So this child count is stated against the running total of everyone who reached a hospital rather than against the named list, and it is the one place in the record where the Gaza Ministry of Health attaches a demographic count directly to that quantity.
The infant figure moved sharply between two ministry statements. On 13 August 2024 the Gaza Ministry of Health stated that 115 infants had been born and killed during the war. On 23 March 2025 it stated 247. Both are the ministry’s own counts of its own record, seven months apart, and no method for either is published.
The same day carries an administrative note that bears on the base. 233 records were added to the cumulative total on 23 March 2025 by approval rather than by new deaths, described as records completed and approved by the judicial committee following the notifications and missing-persons file. A demographic count and an administrative addition were published on the same date against the same running figure.
What none of these statements supplies is a women-and-children figure drawn from the category lists themselves. The Gaza Ministry of Health publishes separate lists for children, women, the elderly and the orphans of martyrs alongside each combined round, and those four documents are posted as separate files rather than as counts in a statement.
Did the ministry revise ages it had already recorded?
Zero date-of-death columns appear across all four of the published lists, read directly on 10 September 2026. Each records a date of birth instead. The Gaza Ministry of Health stated on 29 July 2024 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 it found martyrs who had been under 18 at death while being registered several months later.
The string تاريخ الاستشهاد, date of martyrdom, appears in no column header of any of the four documents. That is the most common description made of these lists and it does not match the record: what they publish is a birth date and a computed age, not a death date.
An age column built that way is a derived field, and the ministry’s own statement says what it is derived from. Where a record was entered on a relative’s report months after the death, the age carried on the list is the age at registration unless someone corrects it, which is precisely the correction the Gaza Ministry of Health says its committee made.
That committee is the only audit of the age field the ministry has described. It reported no count of how many records were revised, no date range for the revisions, and no statement of whether the published rounds were reissued afterward. The March, April, June and August 2024 documents stand as posted.
The practical bound this sets on any child share is narrow and specific. A record whose subject was under 18 at death and over 18 at registration would sit in the adult rows of a list posted before the correction, and the Gaza Ministry of Health states that such records existed. It does not state how many, so the direction of the effect is known from the issuing body’s own account and the size of it is not.
Which of the ministry’s two unidentified counts is right?
9,715 is the figure the Gaza Ministry of Health published for records whose data was not yet complete at 30 June 2024, and it does not close against the ministry’s own daily report for that date. Adding it to the completed records produces the 1 July total rather than the 30 June one.
The arithmetic is short. 28,185 plus 9,715 is 37,900, which is the figure in the daily report of 1 July 2024. The daily report of 30 June 2024 gives 37,877. A reader who instead subtracts the list from the 30 June total arrives at 9,692, which is 23 records below the number the ministry itself published for the same quantity on the same date.
9,692 is the figure that entered the peer-reviewed literature. Jamaluddine and colleagues (2025) recorded it in The Lancet as the unidentified decedents in the ministry’s 30 June 2024 update, 26% of its cumulative total, and excluded those records from the hospital list used in their analysis. The completeness of that registry is the subject of its own report. What belongs here is the narrower point: the Gaza Ministry of Health published a competing figure of its own, 9,715, and the two are not the same number.
Neither subtraction is sound as a general method, and the ministry’s own documents show why. The cumulative total counts everyone who reached a hospital; the list counts only records the ministry has finished; and the Gaza Ministry of Health adds to the total by administrative approval months after the fact. The one place the ministry performs the subtraction itself is this date, and its own two figures miss its own daily report by a day.
The same one-day slip runs through the annual report, where the period-end figures for 31 December 2024 are the daily figures published on 1 January 2025. Any share of women and children computed from these documents inherits that slip in its denominator.
Where is the ministry’s fatality list actually published?
2,536 PDFs sit in the Gaza Ministry of Health’s own media library, paged in full on 10 September 2026, the newest of them dated 21 October 2023 and none of them a casualty list. The four list documents this report read sit on no government web host at all, and the issuing body’s only publication venue is a media-office channel that serves message text and no file.
The ministry’s own statistics page, headed for detailed cumulative statistics of the war on the Gaza Strip, is an empty shell carrying a date of 10/05/2023. The interactive statistics platform the ministry now names, www.sehatty.ps, returned a 404 on the path the ministry publishes when it was requested on 10 September 2026.
So the four documents were read from a public mirror, and the read was checked against what the Gaza Ministry of Health itself states about them. The March file is 15,758,055 bytes against the 15 MB the ministry’s own post records for the file it published; the file’s internal metadata shows a creation date of 1 April 2024 against a 3 April posting; and its record count and column set match the ministry’s own description of what it posted. Its SHA-256 digest begins 0952bdf2. That is a retrieval obstacle rather than a defect in the record, and it is stated here so that no relayer is mistaken for the source.
The corroborating publications on a ministry-run host are the two annual reports, which the Ministry of Health published under the statistical reports heading at its Ramallah site. Those carry the shares and the category counts. They do not carry the lists.
The situation this leaves a reader in is concrete. The only ministry document that records a sex and an age per decedent is not retrievable from any government server, and the two ministry documents that are retrievable publish shares and counts without the rows behind them.
Methodology
This report reads what the Gaza Ministry of Health has published about the sex and age of the people it counts, and sets each figure against the document that carries it. Every figure names the body that produced it, the date it covers and its source type.
Official and party records. The Ministry of Health, Gaza, published the four list documents to 29 March, 30 April, 30 June and 31 August 2024, the daily statistical reports quoted here, and the completeness, exclusion and date-recording statements that travel with them. It is a party to the war reporting on its own count, self-reported throughout and not independently verified, and every figure drawn from it is labelled that way in the sentence carrying it. The two Health Annual Reports, Palestine 2024 and 2025, are Ramallah-published national reports of the same ministry and are a second ministry voice on the same underlying count. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics brief for the end of 2025 is an official statistical product of the Palestinian Authority; its Gaza death figure is attributed to the ministry and was not measured by the Bureau.
Peer-reviewed research. Jamaluddine, Abukmail, Aly, Campbell and Checchi (2025) in The Lancet supplies the 9,692 unidentified decedents and the description of the ministry’s two input lists. Huynh, Chin and Spiegel (2024) in The Lancet is correspondence, editorially reviewed and not peer-reviewed, and is cited only for the window its own measurement covers.
Research project reports. Crawford (2025) for the Costs of War project at Brown University is not peer-reviewed and collects no casualty data itself; it is cited as a place where the ministry’s cumulative pair was compiled.
Limitations. The four list documents were read from a public mirror because the ministry publishes them on no government host, and the checks run against its own stated file size, record count and column set are set out above. The 2025 annual report’s four shares were read off a rendered page whose text layer returns values and labels unpaired. No count is summed or compared across bodies with different definitions: the cumulative totals, the named lists and the annual reports measure different populations at different dates, and each figure is reported only against its own base. The counts inside the separate category lists for children, women, the elderly and the orphans of martyrs were not read, so no women-and-children figure is derived from them here.
Conclusion
So does the Gaza Ministry of Health publish a women-and-children figure of its own? It does, in its own annual report, and the figure is children 30% and women 16% of martyrs for 2023 to 2025, against a total of 71,271 it states on the same page.
Everything else follows from which of that ministry’s two documents a figure comes from. The cumulative total that travels through research reports and statistical briefs carries deaths and injuries and no demographic field whatsoever. The named list that carries sex and age grew 61% in five months, dropped two of its seven columns in the round posted on 5 May 2024 and restored them in the next, renamed its identity field mid-series, and records a birth date rather than a date of death in every round. The ministry’s own audit committee found ages recorded at registration that were wrong at death. Its two annual reports print counts and shares that cannot be converted into one another. Its own two figures for 30 June 2024 close on the following day’s total rather than that day’s. And the only document with a row per person sits on no government server.
A number moves through public argument with a body’s name attached and a document underneath it, and only the name usually travels. When the figure being quoted turns out to describe a list that changed its own columns twice in five months, what is a reader actually being asked to accept: the count, or the custody of it?
Frequently Asked Questions
Why can a cumulative death toll not be broken down by sex?
Because the document producing it holds no sex field. The Gaza Ministry of Health’s daily statistical report publishes two running integers, martyrs and injuries, for example 37,877 and 86,969 on 30 June 2024. Demographic attributes exist only on the separate name-by-name list the ministry publishes periodically.
Does the ministry publish separate lists for women and children?
Yes. Alongside each combined round the Gaza Ministry of Health posts separate category documents for children, women, the elderly and the orphans of martyrs, four of them in the round covering deaths to 30 April 2024. The counts inside those files were not read for this report, so no figure is derived from them here.
Has any study compared the ministry’s counts with another body’s?
For the war since 2023, yes: Jamaluddine and colleagues (2025) published a capture-recapture analysis in The Lancet. For earlier conflicts, no. The range of 1.5% to 3.8% that circulates for previous wars is a single uncited sentence in a Lancet correspondence letter (Huynh, Chin and Spiegel, 2024) whose own measurement covers 7 October to 10 November 2023 and nothing earlier.
What does complete data mean on these lists?
It is the ministry’s own phrase for a record it has finished processing, and the Gaza Ministry of Health defines the term itself: the general martyr count is everyone who reached the hospitals, and the complete-data count is everyone whose data the ministry has finished. At 30 June 2024 that was 28,185 records against 9,715 not yet complete.
Does the ministry record whether a person was a combatant?
No such field appears in any of the four list documents read, and the Gaza Ministry of Health publishes no combatant or non-combatant breakdown in its daily reports or its annual reports. The only partition its own record supports is by sex and by age.
Why would the age on a list need auditing at all?
Because the age is derived from a date of birth and a registration, not from a recorded date of death. The Gaza Ministry of Health stated on 29 July 2024 that the date was taken from the family’s report or from arrival at a hospital, and that a committee it formed found martyrs who had been under 18 at death registered several months later.
Who else publishes the ministry’s figure?
Crawford (2025) at Brown University’s Costs of War project put 67,075 killed and 169,430 injured as of 3 October 2025, relayed from the ministry through a United Nations casualty dashboard, and the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics reported 70,942 deaths to the end of December 2025 and attributed them to the ministry. Neither body measured the figure itself.
Sources
- 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.
- 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 and not peer-reviewed.
- Jamaluddine, Abukmail, Aly, Campbell and Checchi, 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.
- Ministry of Health (Palestine), 2024. Health Annual Report, Palestine 2024, section 1.1. Ramallah. site.moh.ps. Official record (a party to the war reporting its own count, not independently verified).
- Ministry of Health (Palestine), 2025. Health Annual Report, Palestine 2025, Graph (2). Ramallah. site.moh.ps. Official record (a party to the war reporting its own count, not independently verified).
- Ministry of Health, Gaza, 2024. The published martyr lists to 29 March, 30 April, 30 June and 31 August 2024, the daily statistical reports, and the completeness, exclusion and date-recording statements of 7 January, 24 July and 29 July 2024. Ministry 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 on the child breakdown, 23 March 2025, with the daily statistical report of the same date and the administrative additions of 23 March and 30 August 2025. Ministry media office channel, t.me/MOHMediaGaza. Official record (a party to the war reporting its own count, not independently verified).
- Ministry of Health, Gaza, 2026. Retrieval record of 10 September 2026: the ministry media library at moh.gov.ps paged in full, the cumulative statistics page, and the named statistics platform at www.sehatty.ps. Official record (publication venue of a party to the war, verified by direct retrieval).
- 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).