The lives lost in Gaza

Mohammed now lives with his uncle in Gaza after his home was hit by an Israeli strike on November 18, 2023. The names of his mother, father, brother and two sisters are now on Gaza Health Ministry’s list of the dead.

Although a ceasefire halted the fighting on January 19, the ministry’s list is still growing. It has climbed by more than 1,400 since the truce began because bodies are being unearthed from the rubble as people return to devastated neighbourhoods.

With the first phase of the ceasefire due to end on Saturday, little progress has been made in talks towards a permanent end to the conflict.

The death toll from the war already dwarfs the numbers killed in previous bouts of fighting between Israelis and Palestinians in Gaza.

Palestinians accuse Israel of indiscriminate bombardment of the Strip, which is home to more than two million people. Israel’s military says it tries to avoid harming civilians but that fighters loyal to Palestinian Islamist group Hamas hid among the general population.

Israel has also suffered badly. It says Hamas and allied Palestinian militant groups killed around 1,200 people in the Oct. 7 attack and abducted another 251, dragging them back to Gaza. It has also lost more than 400 troops in the fighting.

Reuters examined the data from the Gaza Health Ministry to look more closely at those who have died.

It found that almost a quarter of those killed in the territory were children under the age of 12. More than 1,200 families were completely wiped out, the data showed, including one entire family of 14 people. And the number of Palestinian males aged 15-65 killed, according to the health ministry figures, was 19,185 – almost equivalent to the Israeli estimates of Hamas fighters eliminated.

A history of violence

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is driven by competing claims for land. Israel - which has fought several wars with neighboring countries since its creation in 1948 - defends its right to secure its own borders. Palestinians want to create their own state in Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Israel captured both territories in 1967 in the Six Day War. Gaza was a focal point for Palestinian uparisings against Israeli rule in 1988 and again in 2000.

Israeli forces unilaterally pulled out in 2005 and Hamas - an Islamist group that seeks the destruction of Israel - seized control of it in 2007, expelling its rival Fatah.

But the violence did not stop. In the following years, Hamas attacked Israel with rockets and attempted infiltrations. Israel launched several major military operations against the group.

Reuters visualised the death toll for both Palestinians and Israelis in Gaza since the Israeli pull-out in September 2005. The data comes from the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem.

B’Tselem has built a database that it says has tracked every recorded death directly from the conflict over decades. The organisation, whose donors include U.N. bodies and Western governments, cross-checks press reports with eyewitness accounts and official sources. It has not yet published any figures on the current conflict.   Israel’s military and Hamas did not respond when asked to comment on B’Tselem’s data.

Disputes over numbers

Counting the dead in war zones is difficult and the numbers are often disputed.

The Israeli military says the health ministry in Gaza is controlled by Hamas and subject to its agenda: “In consequence, as has been proved and demonstrated repeatedly, the data of the ministry is replete with inconsistencies and false determinations. For instance, the Ministry makes no attempt to differentiate between civilian casualties and terrorists, and has been known to record deaths unrelated to the conflict, such as natural deaths,” the Israeli military said.

However, the ministry’s figures are seen as reliable by U.N. agencies, such as the World Health Organisation, many academics and international NGOs. Christian Lindmeier, a WHO spokesperson, said “we do have confidence” in the numbers.

Israel’s military has accepted in briefings that the overall casualty numbers are broadly reliable, but it says many of those killed were fighters.

The Gaza Health Ministry has rejected Israeli criticism of its numbers, saying it has worked hard to ensure they are accurate and that it has been transparent about its methodology and data. It says it has only included direct deaths from the conflict, not those who died from causes such as disease or lack of shelter.

The genders and ages of the identified Palestinian casualties from October 7, 2023 to October 7, 2024.

Another family to suffer in this way was that of Palestinian father Abdelsalam al-Banna. He lost his two children aged 8 and 5 when their apartment building collapsed during an Israeli airstrike on Dec. 15, 2023. He also lost his wife, sister-in-law and father-in-law.

Banna has little recollection of the week he spent buried in the collapsed ruins of the building. He said he was unconscious for much of the time and drank urine to survive.

“The place was as dark as a grave. I didn’t realise what happened. It felt like a dream,” he said. After seven days his mother-in-law and another sister-in-law, who had all been in a corridor near concrete pillars that created a pocket of space, finally found a way out of the rubble after feeling air.

More than a year later, the bodies of his wife and children remain buried beneath the rubble. Banna registered their deaths at a local hospital, providing witness statements from him and his in-laws that the family had been present in the building when it collapsed but had not emerged.

“Nothing is more painful than this. I can’t put them to rest,” he said.

Banna and Mohammed’s uncle Muataz al-Agha said that neither building was known to shelter active Hamas members or fighters. Reuters could not independently confirm this.

Israel said it needed precise coordinates of the air strikes that killed the Agha and Banna families to comment on them. Reuters was unable to provide those details and buildings in that area were not numbered as street addresses.

“Biggest massacre of Jews”

When Hamas militants stormed into Israel from Gaza on October 7, 2023, they killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and seized 251 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.

Those killed in the Hamas attack included 329 soldiers and 58 police, Israel says.

At least 84 hostages are either confirmed or presumed to have died according to statements by Israel authorities.

It says 405 of its military have also been killed in the war.

Israel has called October 7 the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

Among the people killed by Hamas on October 7 were three entire Israeli nuclear families according to Israel’s Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes by Hamas. One of these was the Siman Tov family: parents Yonatan and Tamar, their six-year-old twins Shahar and Arbel, and four-year-old son Omer.

Palestinian families erased

There are 1,238 Palestinian families that have been wiped out, with no survivors, according to the ministry figures. The data defines families as married couples and their children. 70% of these families were made up of between 2 to 4 people.

Families of 5 to 9 people made up 30% of those erased.

Among the larger families, there were three families of 11 people who were killed. The biggest family to be eliminated was the Haj family, whose 14 members were killed in the current conflict, according to the data provided by the Palestinian ministry of health.

After Israel bombed Suhail al-Majdalawi’s apartment building two months into the war, rescue workers helped unearth the bodies of 11 of his relatives. But they could not find six more, including three small children. He is waiting for authorities to bring heavy equipment to dig out their bodies.

“I’ve lost all my family and I am very tired and don’t know what to do,” he said.

Palestinian health authorities say there could be 10,000 dead still lying, uncounted, under the rubble. That figure is not included in this graphic.