The IDF confirmed on Wednesday a death toll of around 70,000 people killed in the Gaza Strip during the war, telling Israeli media outlets that the overall number given by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry (GHM) is roughly correct while disputing several other central claims, including those alleging starvation.

The death toll includes all deaths occurring in the Gaza Strip since Oct. 7, including those not directly linked to Israeli military actions, like natural deaths, executions of alleged traitors by Hamas, or the frequent misfires of rockets that landed in the Gaza Strip, rather than in Israel.

International organizations have claimed that up to 450 people died of starvation. However, the IDF stated that these numbers are either compiled from false statistics or include those who suffered from dangerous, often rare, health conditions prior to the war.

No otherwise healthy Palestinian starved to death in the Gaza Strip, the IDF emphasized.

The Israeli military is still analyzing the data provided by the GHM to see how many of those killed are terrorists and how many are civilians, it said, noting that the Israeli estimate is that around 25,000 of those killed were Hamas terrorists.

The IDF also recognized that the number in the GHM's list may not include residents buried under the rubble, and thus could rise further.

The Gaza Health Ministry (GHM) does not provide estimates of its own regarding the number of combatants killed, and previous attempts by outside organizations to analyze the GHM data have demonstrated significant discrepancies.

According to the GHM, 71,667 residents in the Gaza Strip were killed since the outbreak of the war until January 2026.

The statistics published by the Health Ministry regarding the dead and wounded in the Gaza Strip have been used by many international organizations, governments, media outlets, and even researchers, with different groups often making contradictory conclusions based on the data.

The Israeli government has never officially accepted the data, and the Foreign Ministry even called it "misleading and unreliable" in 2024.

The GHM tally of killed people is based on an openly available and editable spreadsheet, which has attracted criticism from some analysts.

One analyst who has examined the GHM data sheet and provided his own interpretation of the figures is Salo Aizenberg, an author and researcher for Honest Reporting, UN Watch, NGO Monitor, and others.

In his analysis of the GHM's data, Aizenberg noted that the Hamas-run organization does not offer any breakdown of the deaths that indicates the cause of death. Based on previous periods of conflict, in which the GHM admitted it includes all deaths in the casualty count, including natural deaths, this means that analysis of data requires some extra work by the researcher.

Aizenberg showed that if one accounts for around 10,000-12,000 natural deaths, based on the average number of natural deaths in the two years preceding the war, then one is left with about 60,000 dead due to the war and related conditions. The IDF claims to have killed around 25,000 combatants during the war, which leaves around 35,000 other deaths.

Aizenberg and others have noted that deaths by misfired Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad missiles are within those figures. The IDF recently revealed that about 13% of all rocket launches by the terror organizations in the first six months of the war were faulty, falling back into the Gaza Strip.

Additionally, deaths caused by Hamas reprisals against Gazans believed to be aiding Israel are also included among the "war dead."

The IDF said on Thursday that it is working on its own evaluation of the GHM data integrated with its internal calculations of the number of combatants killed, although it gave no date for when this analysis would be published.

A report published by the Henry Jackson Society in early 2025 showed that the Hamas-run GHM had misrepresented the number of women and children killed in the conflict, claiming that over 70% of all deaths were in that category. That report found that during a roughly six-month period, from October 2024 to March 2025, just over half of all deaths were combat-age men.

That report found "extensive statistical anomalies, glaring inconsistencies, and a concerted effort by Hamas to inflate the number of civilian deaths – particularly among women and children – while systematically omitting combatant fatalities, especially amongst its own operatives."

A previous report by the Henry Jackson Society even documented cases in which people killed by Hamas, or deaths of cancer patients, were included in the GHM's list of war fatalities.

The GHM death figures have also played a part in accusations by international groups, such as the UN and affiliated nongovernmental organizations, which accused Israel of causing a famine at various points during the two-year war. In particular, several Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) reports were used to allege that Gaza was at the threshold or experiencing famine conditions.

The Israeli government, along with other analysts, pushed back against the claims, pointing out errors in the reports, which often followed from a failure to follow the IPC's own methodology and guidelines.

Aizenberg noted that there was a discrepancy between the projected number of deaths due to malnutrition, which should have numbered in the thousands per month, and the GHM's own estimate of 475 Gazans who died from "famine and malnutrition" during the entire two-year war.

According to a report in The Jerusalem Post, the IDF also disputes some of those deaths, as the military claims that it knew of cases where children were reported dead, but were established to still be alive.

The IDF's COGAT (Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories) has often pointed out discrepancies between the United Nations' rhetoric, accusing Israel of limiting food or other humanitarian aid, while the amount of aid going in often exceeds the U.N.'s own recommendations.

While the IDF has not published any data of its own to counter the U.N.'s claims of starvation deaths, it is expected to provide detailed information to the International Court of Justice in March as part of the ongoing Gaza genocide claims case raised by South Africa.

Republished with permission from All Israel News.