Estimates remain provisional, but the total human cost of Israel’s war on Gaza will greatly exceed the number of direct victims. In two years, more than 65,000 have been killed and 175,000 injured by bombs and bullets, according to Gaza health ministry figures cited by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA).

However, one article in The Lancet suggests that the true figure for deaths due to traumatic injury is higher, and that mortality has been under-reported by over 40%. Another points out that, in recent conflicts, ‘indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths’. Yet with the confinement and harassment of the population and the destruction of infrastructure, the ill-treatment and deliberate starvation inflicted on Gazans will also have a devastating impact in the medium-to-long term.

‘More than 10% of Gaza’s 2.2 million population have been killed or injured. This isn’t a gentle war,’ former Israeli army chief Herzi Halevi told residents of Ein HaBesor, an Israeli town near Gaza, on 9 September. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics has revised its population estimates for Gaza to reflect the numbers of people killed and missing and the fall in the birth rate. The figures indicate ‘a 6% decrease when compared to the mid-2024 population projections [and] a decrease of 10% from what was estimated for mid-2025’ – down from 2.349 million to 2.114 million.

According to many international institutions and Israeli bodies, this slaughter, mainly of civilians, signals intent to destroy, or at least reduce, Gaza’s Palestinian population, contravening the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

What are the motives for this mass crime? The Gaza war came just as demographic studies were revealing the double failure of the Zionist project. One hundred and twenty-eight years after the first congress of the World Zionist Organisation, held in (…)

Full article: 1 171 words.

(4) Ronnie Green Shaulov, ‘Halevi to the residents of Ein Habseor’ (in Hebrew), 10 September 2025, www.ynet.co.il/.

(5) All statistics are from Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics (www.cbs.gov.il) or the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (www.pcbs.gov.ps).