On October 7, 2023, Hamas-led fighters attacked Israel, killing some 1,200 people and taking around 251 hostage. What followed in Gaza was a war of a scale the enclave had never endured — a catastrophe measured above all in Palestinian lives.
The story in images
Gaza in images
The toll
The scale of what was inflicted on Gaza’s people is recorded in figures from Gaza’s Health Ministry: as of September 26, 2026, it reported 74,016 Palestinians killed and 175,068 wounded. The Ministry’s records are viewed as generally reliable by UN agencies; they do not distinguish civilians from militants, and women and children make up around half the toll. Even after the ceasefire that took effect on October 10, 2025, the killing did not stop — 1,145 Palestinians were killed after it took effect.
The estimate
The recorded deaths are almost certainly an undercount. Researchers writing in The Lancet — Khatib, McKee and Yusuf, in July 2024 — estimated that indirect deaths, from a destroyed health system, hunger and disease, could push the true toll toward roughly 186,000. It is an estimate, not a count — but it is the figure serious researchers put on what the bombs did not directly do.
The siege
2024 was the year the siege tightened. The offensive on Rafah and the intensifying blockade through 2024 squeezed the enclave’s last lifelines, and the world’s gaze fixed on a strip of land under total pressure — hospitals failing, bakeries closing, the arithmetic of survival shrinking day by day.
A ceasefire that did not hold
On October 10, 2025, a ceasefire took effect — and then did not end the killing. The 1,145 Palestinians killed after the ceasefire took effect stand as the measure of a truce that held on paper and bled on the ground.
The war in Gaza was fought in front of the cameras — the most documented catastrophe in history. The trigger of October 7, 2023 was real and brutal; what it licensed was a campaign whose toll, measured in Palestinian lives, belongs among the defining records of the century. History will argue about everything else. The count is not an argument.