The death toll in the Gaza-Israel conflict

By Lazaro Gamio and Richard Johnson,

Statistics on death tolls during active conflict are often difficult to track accurately. A note on our sourcing:

For death toll numbers from within Gaza, we receive daily or sometimes twice daily updates from the head of the Information Management Unit in the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Palestinian Territories field office in the West Bank. The field office gets updates from multiple sources within Gaza, including U.N. agencies and the Palestinian Medical Authorities. They then create and continually update a spreadsheet of all available data. These numbers are often not complete, but represent the best available data and do tend to clarify over time. Israel disputes the numbers provided by the United Nations, saying that a large number of those killed, particularly males over 18, were armed terrorists and not civilians.

For death toll numbers of Israeli soldiers, we rely on Israel Defense Forces press releases and their Twitter account. For Israeli civilian deaths, we rely on news reports and our reporters in Israel and Gaza. These numbers are similarly tentative initially but clarify over time.

Related articles: Reporters grapple with politics, erratic sources in reporting Israeli/Gaza death toll (Washington Post) | Caution needed with Gaza casualty figures (BBC) | Civilian or Not? New Fight in Tallying the Dead From the Gaza Conflict (New York Times)

Deaths up to

SOURCE: U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and Israel Defense Forces.