MORE THAN 71,000 DEAD IN GAZA: Israel’s monumental admission

In a historic admission, after more than two years of relentless bombardment in Gaza, Israel’s military has, for the first time, recognized that the death toll figures long documented by the Palestinian Ministry of Health are accurate and verifiable.

In an interview with the Times of Israel on Thursday 29 January a senior military official of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) acknowledged that the Hamas-run health ministry’s death toll from the war in the Gaza Strip has been “largely accurate.” [1]

Briefing reporters on condition of anonymity, the security 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.

What did Israel say about the death toll during the Gaza war?

From the outset of the war, one of the most bitterly contested issues has been the number of fatalities on Gaza’s side. Israel’s own casualty reports were rarely questioned, but Gaza’s numbers were consistently dismissed as unreliable, tainted by the claim that they were “Hamas-driven” and therefore untrustworthy. Because the Gaza Ministry of Health operates under Hamas administration, critics argued its statistics were inflated or manipulated for propaganda purposes.  This claim provided the necessary justification to continue the bombardments under the false narratives that the casualties are far less than reported

In November 2023, a senior Israeli security official suggested that Israel had killed 20,000 people in Gaza, most of them Hamas fighters. The following month, that number had fallen to 7,860 fighters. In August 2024, Israel said it had killed 17,000 fighters but changed that to 14,000 two months later.

Separately, Israel’s allies in the West – as well as Western media – have systematically cast doubt on the death toll compiled by Gaza’s Health Ministry during the war.  In October 2023, some two weeks into the war, after the Health Ministry in Gaza had released a list documenting the deaths of more than 7,000 Palestinians, including nearly 3,000 children, then-US President Joe Biden said that he had “no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using”.

“I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed,” Biden had said.

In September 2024, Netanyahu bragged that Israel had the “lowest ratio of civilian to combatant deaths in the history of modern urban warfare”, claiming the army was killing only one civilian for every fighter it killed. But a leaked military report in August 2025 concluded that more than 80 percent of those Israel had killed in Gaza were civilians.

For many Christians unwilling to confront the scale of killing under Israel’s campaign in Gaza, the claim that Hamas manipulated casualty figures became a cornerstone of their defense. It allowed them to preserve the image of Israel as “the most moral army in the world” while dismissing Gaza’s Ministry of Health as deceitful.

Yet on Thursday, the Israeli military itself shattered that narrative. In a stark admission, the IDF acknowledged that it has killed one in every 33 Gazans—a figure that amounts to genocide in all but name. This acceptance of Gaza’s death toll marks a profound departure from Israel’s long-standing denials and should serve as a wake-up call to its supporters.  The shift is not unprecedented. Throughout this war, and in earlier conflicts, Israel has repeatedly rejected accounts of killings by its forces, despite mounting evidence, only to later concede the facts when denial became impossible to sustain.

But with more than 71,000 dead and over 171,000 injured, the question remains: is this acknowledgment too little, too late?

This is what the current scale of destruction looks like:

Thousands more remain missing, believed to be buried under rubble. The National Committee for Missing Persons warns that this figure could exceed 10,000.

Why is Israel acknowledging the death toll now?

Israel’s announcement on Thursday that it accepts the figure of 70,000 deaths in Gaza comes after more than two years of denying, dismissing, or undermining casualty numbers from the enclave.

Sultan Barakat, senior professor of public policy at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Doha, told Al Jazeera that the timing is significant. “As always, the devil is in the details,” he said. “Greater access to the field by the UN and other humanitarian agencies—including those from Israel’s allies such as the US, UK, and France—combined with the start of rubble removal in Gaza, made continued rejection untenable.”

Barakat explained that partial acceptance at this stage helps Israel preserve institutional credibility and demonstrate seriousness to key partners, particularly in Washington and European capitals.

He also suggested that Israel may be recalibrating its strategy. “Acknowledging the figures allows Israel to reposition its argument internationally. With recent developments around the ‘Board of Peace,’ global attention has shifted from whether genocide and mass death occurred to questions of reconstruction—reframing the debate around responsibility and the circumstances of those deaths.”

This reframing, he noted, emphasizes Hamas’s conduct, the challenges of urban warfare, and the use of civilian infrastructure.

Finally, Barakat pointed to a possible legal dimension. “Acceptance of the scale of harm does not necessarily mean admitting wrongdoing. But it does help construct a more coherent record in anticipation of future investigations, inquiries, or legal proceedings.”

Israel’s shift—from outright denial, to shifting figures, to partial acceptance—fits a familiar pattern: resistance until the facts become impossible to ignore.

 

[1] The Times of Israel (https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-believes-70000-gazans-killed-in-war-as-claimed-by-hamas/)

Al Jazeera (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/1/30/israel-accepts-gazas-70000-death-toll-a-record-of-denialism-lies)