The Israel Defense Forces believes that the Hamas-run health ministry’s death toll from the war in the Gaza Strip has been largely accurate, a senior Israeli military official acknowledged on Thursday.
Briefing reporters on condition of anonymity, the official said that the IDF believes the Gaza death count from the two-plus-year war, sparked by Hamas’s October 7 onslaught, is around 70,000. The Gaza health ministry’s current death toll is 71,667, including over 450 killed since the October 2025 ceasefire.
The senior military official said the actual breakdown of the Gaza death toll is still under review, and it is unknown exactly how many of the dead are members of terror groups and how many people died directly as a result of the fighting.
Israel largely rejected death tolls claimed by Hamas’s health ministry during the war, especially following specific incidents in which the terror group announced what Israeli officials called “exaggerated tolls.”
According to the military official, the toll does not include bodies believed to be buried under the rubble in Gaza, which Hamas estimates at around 10,000.
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The Gaza ministry also claims that at least 440 Palestinians died of malnutrition and starvation in the Strip during the war. Israel denies this, with the military official claiming that these statistics are manipulated by Hamas to include individuals with underlying severe health issues.
Palestinians mourn over the bodies of people reported killed in an Israeli army strike, during their funeral outside Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, Thursday, Sept. 4, 2025. (AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi)
The Gaza health ministry’s records include the names and IDs of over 90 percent of the bodies found. They do not differentiate between civilians and combatants.
Israel never refuted the Hamas health ministry’s data with its own exact figures, instead periodically offering rough ratios of civilians to combatants killed, insisting that the ratio was far lower than in other urban warfare conflicts.
During previous wars, however, Israeli security agencies found the Hamas-run health ministry’s total death counts to be reliable.
Before the October 2025 ceasefire, the IDF said it had killed at least 22,000 combatants, as well as another 1,600 terrorists inside Israel during the October 7 onslaught.
IDF officials also previously said that the combatant-to-civilian death ratio remained relatively the same throughout the war, with two to three civilians killed for every dead terror operative.
Israel has said it seeks to minimize civilian fatalities and stresses that Hamas uses Gaza’s civilians as human shields, fighting from civilian areas, including homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques.
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