Watch this on Rumble: https://rumble.com/v6yn63w-counting-the-dead-the-real-toll-of-gazas-genocide.html
Monologue: Counting the Dead
Every war has its lies. Some wars are hidden behind speeches about freedom. Others cloak themselves in the rhetoric of self-defense. But the war in Gaza is hidden behind numbers. Cold numbers. Carefully managed. Repeated until they sound like fact. Sixty thousand. Sixty-three thousand. As though a figure on a press release could contain the truth of a people’s annihilation.
But here’s the truth: those numbers are not the ceiling—they are the floor. Even the United Nations admits it. Gaza’s Health Ministry names the dead, but it cannot dig through every pile of rubble, cannot exhume every body, cannot count every child who starved to death in a tent because food convoys were turned away. Those lists are only fragments.
Peer-reviewed science tells us the story the politicians won’t. A team of researchers working with The Lancet found that by June of last year, the real toll was forty percent higher than reported. Forty percent of the dead simply erased by chaos and collapse. Apply that same correction today, and Gaza’s war dead are not sixty-three thousand—they are closer to ninety thousand. That’s ninety thousand souls, extinguished in less than two years.
And it doesn’t stop there. A household survey by international researchers looked not just at bombs and bullets, but at what happens when an entire health system is destroyed, when antibiotics vanish, when clean water becomes a luxury. They found tens of thousands more dying silently of sickness and hunger. By early January this year, their estimate was already eighty-four thousand total deaths, with the majority being children, women, and the elderly.
And then came famine. Not a rumor, not an exaggeration, but a formal declaration by the IPC and confirmed by the World Health Organization. Gaza became the first place in the Middle East to be officially declared in famine. And famine has a math all its own. The threshold is two deaths per ten thousand people per day. Gaza Governorate alone holds seven hundred thousand souls. Do the math—thousands more are perishing right now, and those deaths are not yet in the official counts.
So when we sift through the rubble of reports, surveys, and thresholds, we arrive at a truer number: between one hundred thousand and one hundred and seventeen thousand dead as of this moment. And here is the part that tears at the conscience: two-thirds of those are women and children. Forty to fifty thousand children—gone. Twenty-five to thirty thousand women—gone. Mothers and sons, daughters and grandmothers, obliterated in less than two years.
This is not collateral damage. This is not the fog of war. This is the deliberate destruction of a people. And when governments and media call sixty thousand “credible,” they are not lying about the figure—they are lying about the scale. They are letting tens of thousands of souls disappear twice: once into the grave, and once into the silence of bad accounting.
We must not let that happen. We must name the dead. We must speak their truth. Because the body count is not just a number—it is the measure of genocide. And history will remember not only the bombs that fell, but whether we had the courage to count honestly, to weep honestly, and to resist the lie that it was anything less than the destruction of a people.
Part 1: The Official Floor
When we talk about Gaza’s death toll, the first place everyone points is the Gaza Health Ministry. Their figures are the only numbers that exist in real time. And as of early September 2025, their reports—relayed through the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs—say 63,746 Palestinians have been killed since October 7, 2023.
That is the number you see in headlines, in wire reports, in government briefings. It is repeated so often it takes on an air of finality, as though it were the full story. But the Health Ministry itself doesn’t claim that. Their own press lines admit the figures are incomplete, subject to revision, subject to delayed identification. Even the UN attaches caveats: these are the deaths recorded, not the deaths exhaustively counted.
Why the gap? Because Gaza is not a functioning state right now. Its hospitals have been bombed. Its civil registries have been destroyed. Families are scattered, and whole neighborhoods have been buried under rubble for months. When a body is not recovered, it is not listed. When a family dies together and no one is left to file the paperwork, they vanish from the tally.
So the official 63,746 is not the ceiling—it is the floor. It is the lowest possible number that anyone can defend with a list of names and hospital reports. And to stop there is to participate in the lie. Because in every war, the official lists are smaller than the graves.
But here’s why the floor still matters: it anchors us. It says, “At the very least, this many are gone.” It is the baseline we will use to build upward, layer by layer, until the true toll comes into focus. And already, when you look at the composition of that official floor, you see the horror. UNICEF has tracked the proportion of women and children in those counts—roughly two-thirds. Even before we correct for undercounting, that means at least 40,000 of those named dead are women and children. Forty thousand souls, lost in just under two years, before we even begin adjusting the numbers.
This is why Part 1 is so important: because when the world tells you 63,000, what they are really saying is “at least 63,000.” And our task is to make sure the “at least” is not forgotten.
Part 2: The Evidence of Undercounting
If Part 1 gave us the floor, Part 2 shows us how shaky that floor really is. Because we don’t have to guess whether Gaza’s death toll is being undercounted—we have proof.
In January 2025, The Lancet, one of the world’s most respected medical journals, published a peer-reviewed study using a method called capture–recapture analysis. It sounds technical, but here’s the simple version: the researchers compared multiple independent lists of the dead—hospital records, morgue reports, NGO tallies—and then cross-matched them to see where the lists overlapped and, crucially, where they didn’t. By measuring how many deaths appeared on one list but not another, they could mathematically estimate how many people never made it onto any list at all.
And what they found was staggering. By June 30, 2024, Gaza’s Health Ministry reported 37,877 deaths. But when the capture–recapture method was applied, the real number was closer to 64,260. That’s a difference of more than 26,000 souls—vanished from the record, but not from the earth. Put another way, the Health Ministry was undercounting by about 41 percent.
Think about that. Imagine walking into a cemetery and finding nearly half the graves unmarked. That is what the numbers tell us. The official lists are not fabrications, but they are fragments—shattered by the collapse of record-keeping, by the chaos of bombardment, by the simple fact that bodies remain buried under rubble for weeks or months.
And this wasn’t just a one-time anomaly. That forty-percent undercount is consistent across the period studied. Which means it’s not a statistical fluke—it’s a systemic failure of a system that can no longer function under siege.
So what does that mean for us today? It means that if the Health Ministry is now reporting 63,746 dead, we must recognize that this figure is also missing tens of thousands of people. And when we apply that same correction factor, we begin to see the outlines of the true toll.
But here’s what makes it even more damning: the composition of the missing. The study showed that women, children, and the elderly were disproportionately absent from the official lists. These are the victims least likely to die as combatants, the least likely to be remembered by military record-keepers. In other words, the invisibility of Gaza’s dead is not random—it’s weighted toward the most vulnerable.
This is why the evidence of undercounting matters. Because when you hear the official floor—63,746—you must now carry with it the weight of an additional forty percent. You must hear the silence where the names should be. And you must understand that the real number is not sixty-three thousand. It is closer to ninety thousand, and climbing.
Part 3: Adjusting the Current Total
Now that we’ve established the floor, and shown the forty-percent gap proven by The Lancet, we can take the next step: applying that correction to today’s numbers.
The Gaza Health Ministry, as relayed by the UN, reports 63,746 deaths as of early September 2025. If we stop there, we fall into the trap of thinking that’s the whole picture. But once we apply the peer-reviewed correction factor, the landscape changes dramatically.
Here’s the math, simple and transparent. Take 63,746 and add forty percent. That gives us roughly 89,000 to 90,000 people. That is the most credible estimate of violent deaths in Gaza to date—those killed by bombs, bullets, collapsing buildings. Ninety thousand. That’s not a projection, not a guess. That’s the corrected number grounded in scientific method.
Now, remember: numbers this large can blur together in the mind. Ninety thousand sounds abstract. So let’s bring it down to scale. Imagine a city the size of South Bend, Indiana. Or Cambridge, in the United Kingdom. Imagine every person in that city—men, women, children, the elderly—gone in less than two years. That’s the scale of violent death in Gaza.
And within that ninety thousand, the breakdown is clear. UNICEF and OCHA data show that about two-thirds of the victims are women and children. That means 40,000 to 50,000 children are already dead. 25,000 to 30,000 women are gone. These aren’t faceless statistics; they’re school classrooms erased, maternity wards silenced, family lines cut off.
This is why the correction matters. Without it, we say sixty-three thousand and stop. With it, we recognize ninety thousand violent deaths—and most of them not fighters, but the most vulnerable. And that’s before we even begin to count the hidden deaths: those under rubble, those who starved in the dark, those who died for lack of medicine.
Part 3 brings us to a new reality. The Gaza Health Ministry gave us the floor. The Lancet gave us the correction. And now we see the true picture of violent death: ninety thousand lives lost, two-thirds of them women and children.
Part 4: The Missing Bodies
Even after we correct the official numbers upward, we’re still not done. Because there’s a whole category of the dead who don’t appear in any tally yet. These are the people still buried under Gaza’s rubble.
The Washington Post and UN officials have acknowledged that at least 10,000 Palestinians remain missing—presumed dead beneath the ruins of bombed-out neighborhoods. Entire families entombed where their homes once stood. In war after war, this is one of the hardest realities to measure: unrecovered bodies. They don’t show up in hospital records. They don’t make it into morgue reports. They exist in memory, in absence, in the testimony of neighbors who saw the building fall and never saw anyone come out again.
Think about what that means. When we say ninety thousand violent deaths based on corrected counts, that number doesn’t yet include those ten thousand under the rubble. That’s ten thousand more children whose names were never written down. Ten thousand more women never given a death certificate. Ten thousand more elderly never laid in a grave.
And the tragedy is compounded by the simple fact that Gaza lacks the equipment to even recover them. Heavy machinery is scarce. Fuel is blocked. Rescue crews themselves have been targeted. So the dead remain in place—silent, hidden, and uncounted.
This matters for two reasons. First, because every missing body is a family that never gets closure, never gets to mourn properly. In Palestinian culture, like in so many of ours, burial is not just ritual—it’s dignity. And that dignity has been stolen.
Second, it matters because once again, the invisibility falls hardest on women and children. Whole households were wiped out in single airstrikes. When no survivor remains to file the paperwork, no record is created. So the bias in the counts—already skewed against the most vulnerable—becomes even worse.
So add this to our growing picture. Not only do we have ninety thousand violent deaths when adjusted, but we must also carry the weight of at least ten thousand more still trapped in Gaza’s rubble. Which means the true violent toll is already pushing toward the hundred-thousand mark—before we even talk about hunger, disease, or famine.
The missing bodies are the shadow statistic. Everyone knows they exist. No one knows all their names. And yet their absence is the loudest testimony of all: that Gaza’s destruction has outstripped the ability of any system to keep count.
Part 5: Beyond Bullets and Bombs — Indirect Deaths
When we think of war deaths, we picture the bombed-out apartment block, the lifeless bodies pulled from the rubble, the sharp flash of violence that ends a life in an instant. But war kills in slower ways too. It kills in hospital corridors when the power goes out. It kills in kitchens when there is no food. It kills in tents when children drink dirty water because clean water no longer exists. These are the indirect deaths—the silent casualties that never make headlines.
In January 2025, an international team of researchers from London, Princeton, and Stanford released a household survey later posted on medRxiv and reported by Nature. Their findings were clear: the death toll in Gaza by early January was already around 84,000 people—far higher than the official counts at the time. And here’s the crucial part: a large share of those deaths weren’t from bombs, but from hunger, disease, and untreated wounds.
Think about what that means. By the start of this year, tens of thousands of Gazans had already died simply because the systems that sustain life—healthcare, sanitation, food supply—were deliberately dismantled. And the majority of these indirect deaths fell, once again, on the most vulnerable. Children, women, the elderly. The very people who depend on others to survive.
This isn’t new. In every war, indirect deaths outnumber direct ones over time. In Iraq, in Syria, in Yemen, the pattern repeats: more die from the collapse of life than from the strike of a weapon. Gaza is following that same grim path, except at a faster pace, because its blockade was already suffocating before the bombs began to fall.
And here’s the bitter truth: indirect deaths are harder to count. There are no explosion sites to tally. No rubble to sift through. Instead, they show up as malnourished children slipping away in overcrowded wards. As mothers bleeding out because no surgeon is left to operate. As elderly men who don’t survive the winter in makeshift shelters. They vanish into the margins, unremarked and unrecorded.
But when we add them back in, the picture sharpens. We no longer see ninety thousand violent deaths alone. We see tens of thousands more lost to starvation, infection, and deprivation. And when the famine declaration came in August 2025, those indirect deaths accelerated into a flood.
So Part 5 widens our vision. Gaza’s death toll is not just bombs and bullets—it is famine, it is disease, it is the collapse of everything that makes life possible. And if we refuse to count those deaths, then we are refusing to tell the truth.
Part 6: Famine Declared
In August 2025, something happened that had never before occurred in the modern Middle East. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification—known as the IPC—formally declared famine in Gaza Governorate. The World Health Organization immediately echoed that declaration, calling it the first official famine in the region’s recorded history.
Now, famine is not a word used lightly. It has a technical definition, with hard thresholds. For famine to be declared, at least 20 percent of households must be facing extreme food shortages, 30 percent of children must be acutely malnourished, and the crude death rate must exceed two deaths per ten thousand people per day. These are not projections—they are minimums.
Apply that math to Gaza Governorate, home to roughly 700,000 people before the war. At the famine threshold, you’re talking about 140 deaths every single day—and that’s just the baseline required to trigger the classification. In a month, that’s over 4,000 deaths. And famine deaths are rarely counted in real time, because they don’t leave behind rubble or mass casualty events that can be documented. They show up in surveys months later, or in the absence of children who never make it to the clinic.
So when the UN and WHO say famine has been confirmed, they are telling us that the death toll in Gaza has entered an entirely new phase. It’s no longer just the bombs and bullets that are killing people. It’s the empty shelves. It’s the poisoned water. It’s the lack of fuel for hospital generators, the lack of insulin for diabetics, the lack of baby formula for infants.
And famine, like the bombs, is not indiscriminate. It targets the weakest first. Children with tiny reserves of strength. Pregnant and nursing mothers whose bodies are already stretched to the limit. The elderly whose health was fragile before the blockade. These are the faces of famine. And in Gaza, they are dying by the thousands, quietly, invisibly, while the world debates numbers on a spreadsheet.
This is why the famine declaration matters so much. It confirms what Gazans themselves have been saying for months: that starvation has become a weapon of war. That the blockade is not just an economic chokehold—it is a death sentence, carried out meal by meal, day by day.
So when we build our true picture of the death toll, famine forces us higher. Not by speculation, but by hard-coded thresholds, verified by the world’s most conservative agencies. Add those famine deaths to the ninety thousand violent deaths, and the shadow of Gaza’s genocide grows darker still.
Part 7: Constructing a Range
We’ve walked through the pieces one by one—the official floor, the forty-percent undercount, the missing bodies, the indirect deaths, the famine declaration. Now it’s time to assemble them into a single picture.
Start with the official number: 63,746 deaths reported by Gaza’s Health Ministry and relayed by the United Nations. That is our floor.
Apply the forty-percent undercount proven by The Lancet’s capture–recapture study, and the total rises to roughly 90,000 violent deaths. That’s bombs, bullets, collapsing buildings—lives ended by direct strikes.
Now add the shadow of the rubble. At least 10,000 people remain missing beneath the ruins of their homes. Whether we fold them into the forty-percent correction or treat them separately, they push the toll upward, toward the hundred-thousand mark.
But we can’t stop there. The medRxiv household survey showed that by early January 2025, indirect deaths—hunger, infection, untreated wounds—were already swelling the total far beyond the official record. And now that famine has been formally declared, the death rate from non-violent causes is accelerating. Even conservatively, if you add just 15 to 30 percent more to account for indirect deaths, you climb to a total between 100,000 and 117,000 lives lost as of today.
And here’s the part that cuts the deepest: who those people are. Roughly two-thirds of Gaza’s dead are women and children. That means of our conservative total, 40,000 to 50,000 children are already gone. 25,000 to 30,000 women are gone. Those aren’t just numbers; those are schools without students, homes without mothers, entire family lines cut off forever.
So when someone tells you sixty-three thousand, remember this: that’s the floor. The truth, built from peer-reviewed studies, missing-persons data, and famine math, is that Gaza’s genocide has already claimed well over a hundred thousand lives. And the war is not over.
That’s the range we must carry forward: 100,000 to 117,000 people, erased in less than two years, most of them women and children.
Part 8: Why Numbers Matter
Some might ask, why argue over numbers when the tragedy is already so obvious? Isn’t sixty thousand enough to call it horrific? Why fight to prove it’s a hundred thousand or more?
Because in international law, numbers are not just statistics—they are evidence. The Genocide Convention requires not only intent, but proof of scale. A massacre of hundreds can be a war crime. A systematic extermination of hundreds of thousands crosses the threshold into genocide. And so the numbers are fought over like battlegrounds. Whoever controls the death toll controls the narrative.
This is why governments and media cling to the “credible” figure of sixty-three thousand. Because a smaller number feels containable. It sounds tragic, but not unthinkable. It softens the charge. But raise the toll to over a hundred thousand—half of them children—and the crime becomes undeniable. It demands a different word. Not conflict, not war. Genocide.
Numbers matter for another reason: they shape public conscience. People hear sixty thousand and they shrug—it’s less than the population of a medium-sized city. They hear one hundred thousand, and suddenly the scale doubles in their minds. They hear that two-thirds are women and children, and the reality pierces through the fog of military jargon. Numbers translate horror into language the world cannot ignore.
And numbers matter most of all for memory. Every missing death is a person erased twice. Once by the violence that took their life, and again by the silence of bad accounting. To let the numbers stay low is to bury the dead a second time. To count honestly is to honor them.
This is why we must fight for the real total. Because history will not just ask who bombed Gaza. It will ask how many were killed, and whether the world told the truth.
Part 9: The Human Cost Behind Statistics
Statistics can numb us. Sixty thousand, ninety thousand, a hundred thousand—after a while, the mind treats them like digits on a ledger. But behind every number is a life, and behind every life is a story. To see Gaza clearly, we have to break through the abstraction and remember the people.
Picture a classroom in Rafah. Before the war, thirty children sat at their desks, reciting verses, scribbling answers, dreaming of futures as doctors, engineers, poets. Today, more than half of Gaza’s children are out of school. Many of those classrooms are rubble. Many of those students are gone—forty to fifty thousand children, erased from Gaza’s future. Not soldiers. Not combatants. Just kids who wanted to live.
Think of the women. Twenty-five to thirty thousand of them, according to the corrected totals. Mothers who held their children as the walls collapsed. Pregnant women who never made it to delivery because the hospital was bombed or the ambulance blocked at a checkpoint. Nurses who tried to save lives until their own were taken. These women are not footnotes; they are the heart of Gaza’s families and the backbone of its survival.
And then there are the elderly—the grandparents who carried the memories of villages erased in 1948, who survived occupation after occupation, only to starve in the tents of displacement or suffocate under rubble. Their deaths are more than personal tragedies; they are the silencing of Gaza’s living history.
Walk through any refugee camp today and you’ll see the cost in faces. A child with hollow eyes because she hasn’t eaten in days. A father digging with his bare hands for his family. A grandmother clutching a ration card like it’s gold. These are the human forms behind the statistics.
The genocide in Gaza is not just the destruction of buildings—it is the destruction of futures, the unraveling of family lines, the severing of memory itself. When we say one hundred thousand, we are not counting corpses. We are counting extinguished lives—each one as real and precious as yours or mine.
Numbers may define genocide in courtrooms, but faces define it in our hearts. And it is those faces, not the spreadsheets, that will haunt history.
Part 10: The Call to Account
We’ve built the picture. We’ve walked through the floor, the undercount, the missing, the indirect deaths, and the famine. We’ve seen that the true toll is not sixty-three thousand—it is well over a hundred thousand. And we’ve seen that most of them are women and children. The question now is: what do we do with this truth?
In the courts of the world, the struggle is already underway. The International Court of Justice has issued provisional measures in the genocide case brought by South Africa, ordering Israel to prevent genocidal acts and enable humanitarian aid. The International Criminal Court has gone further, issuing arrest warrants for Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Gallant, charging them with crimes against humanity and the war crime of starvation. The law has spoken, if not yet with final judgment.
But law without truth is fragile. These courts depend on numbers—on evidence of scale, on documentation of intent. Every undercount, every missing death, weakens the case. That’s why the propaganda war fights so fiercely over body counts. That’s why governments cling to the lowest figure they can get away with. Because if the world accepts one hundred thousand, then the word “genocide” is no longer a debate—it is a fact.
And so the burden shifts to us—not just lawyers, not just diplomats, but ordinary people. We must be the keepers of the true count. We must refuse to let the dead be erased a second time. We must speak the number plainly: one hundred thousand to one hundred and seventeen thousand lives lost, most of them women and children. And rising still.
For the Church, for every community of faith, the charge is even heavier. Jesus said, “Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me.” What does it mean, then, when the least of these are starving under siege, when the mothers and children of Gaza are being annihilated before our eyes? Silence becomes complicity. Truth becomes obedience. To tell the world what has really happened is not politics—it is discipleship.
And for history, there is no escape. One day, people will ask not only what happened in Gaza, but what the world did with the knowledge of it. Did we minimize it? Did we hide behind official numbers? Or did we speak the truth, no matter how unbearable?
The call to account is clear. For the perpetrators, in courtrooms. For the governments, in parliaments. For the people, in the conscience of our nations. And for us, here and now, in the words we choose.
So let us choose truth. Let us say it without flinching: Gaza’s genocide has already claimed over a hundred thousand lives, two-thirds of them women and children. And let us carry that number, not as a statistic, but as a prayer, a cry, and a demand that justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.
Conclusion: Naming the Dead
When history looks back on this moment, it will not remember the press releases. It will not remember the clever debates on talk shows or the speeches at podiums. It will remember the graves. It will remember the mothers and children who never made it into the official counts, the fathers who dug with their bare hands, the families erased in silence.
The world says sixty-three thousand. The truth is over a hundred thousand. The world says “credible.” But credibility has been twisted into convenience, and convenience into complicity. The real evidence—the peer-reviewed science, the missing bodies, the famine math—points higher. It points to one hundred thousand to one hundred and seventeen thousand human beings gone, most of them women and children. That is the number we must speak.
But more than numbers, we must remember names. Every person lost had a story, a voice, a future. Every child who starved, every woman who bled without care, every elder who carried memory now buried in rubble—they are the reason we must keep counting. To count them is to resist their erasure. To speak their truth is to refuse their annihilation.
And so the conclusion is not an end, but a charge. A charge to tell the truth, even when governments lie. A charge to honor the dead, even when the world would bury them twice. A charge to call this by its rightful name: genocide.
Let it be said that in our time, when silence was easier, we chose truth. Let it be remembered that we named the dead, not as numbers on a page, but as brothers and sisters of the same human family. And let it echo that we believed justice is not optional—it is the cry of the blood from the ground.
This is Gaza’s story. This is our witness. And this is the truth the world must carry forward: over one hundred thousand lives extinguished, two-thirds of them women and children, and a future stolen before our eyes.
Bibliography & Endnotes
United Nations & Humanitarian Sources
United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Occupied Palestinian Territory: Humanitarian Update, August 27 – September 3, 2025. Reports 63,746 deaths and 161,245 injured since October 7, 2023.
UNICEF & OCHA field reports on child and women casualties. Consistently estimate two-thirds of deaths are women and children.
Peer-Reviewed Studies
The Lancet. “Capture–recapture analysis of deaths from traumatic injuries in Gaza, October 7, 2023 – June 30, 2024.” Published January 2025. Estimated 64,260 trauma deaths compared to 37,877 officially reported, revealing ~41% undercount.
The Lancet Correspondence. July 2024. Discussed wider indirect death projections, highlighting famine and health system collapse as multipliers.
Independent Academic Surveys
University of London, Princeton, and Stanford research team. Household mortality survey, Gaza. Preprint posted on medRxiv, early 2025. Estimated ~84,000 total deaths (direct + indirect) by January 2025. Reported in Nature and summarized by Current Affairs.
Famine & Food Security Sources
Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC). Famine Review Committee Report, August 22, 2025. Declared famine in Gaza Governorate.
World Health Organization (WHO). Press statement, August 22, 2025. Confirmed first official famine in the Middle East.
IPC technical thresholds: crude death rate > 2/10,000/day, 20% households facing extreme food shortages, 30% child acute malnutrition.
Media & Investigative Reports
Washington Post. July 29, 2025. Reported ~10,000 missing under rubble and 60,000+ confirmed deaths.
Reuters. March 24, 2025. “How many Palestinians has Israel’s Gaza offensive killed?” Coverage of official and adjusted figures.