"First, let’s talk about the numbers. In Gaza, the dead — at least 68,229 people, by the latest count — have been tallied by the Ministry of Health, which is, like other government services in the enclave, run by Hamas. This has stirred skepticism, to say the least. But experts in counting war dead told me that the ministry’s accounting has been unusually rigorous. It includes not just individual names of people confirmed to have died because of the war but also their ages, their sex and, crucially, easily validated identification numbers.
“The Ministry of Health, we know, for various reasons, is really conservative actually in putting people on the list,” Michael Spagat, a professor at Royal Holloway, University of London, who has studied the toll of war for decades, told me. There is, he said, a remarkable level of transparency. “The information is incomparably better than what we know about recent conflicts in Tigray, Sudan, South Sudan.”
In fact, for all the tally’s trustworthiness, many experts suspect it to be a significant undercount. Spagat and a group of researchers undertook a 2,000-household survey in Gaza that suggested that the official figures were likely to be undercounting the number of people killed in the war by roughly 39 percent.
The fatality figures, though, do not distinguish between fighters and civilians. This fact provides another claim: that most of those killed are Hamas fighters and so legitimate targets. But Spagat’s survey confirms another aspect of the death figures: The majority of those killed — some 56 percent — were women, children and the elderly."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/23/opinion/gaza-ceasefire-death-toll.html
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