Final Gaza death toll could be 803 000 – if the confilict ends today

Alameen Templeton
What is the real Gaza death toll after 400 days of relentless genocide? The official Gaza Health Ministry’s figure is 43 552, with a guesstimated 10 000 missing under the rubble. Others suggest the final, dreadful count could be between 175 000 to 803 000 if Israel put the brakes on today, which it won’t.
Gaza’s health authority is trying to keep an accurate count under impossible circumstances and has had to recalibrate its data collection to try and factor in the growing numbers of unidentified bodies that keep turning up in profusion at overstretched morgues and battered hospitals where even medical personnel are targets for Israel’s military.
Significant undercount
There’s no method to account for bodies buried in a hurry alongside roadways and elsewhere, let alone bodies rotting in the streets amid merciless murder.
So, the “official” toll is seen widely as a significant undercount.
Now, northern Gaza totters on the brink of full-blown famine as the Nazi state continues preventing food from reaching the starving inhabitants. A 30-day US deadline to improve the humanitarian situation is fast approaching. The US last month threatened to start cutting the free flow of armaments to Israel if it did not allow more aid in to Gaza, but it has said little about it since then.
The independent Famine Review Committee said Friday immediate action was needed from all actors in the conflict to turn around “this catastrophic situation”.
“If no effective action is taken by stakeholders with influence, the scale of this looming catastrophe is likely to dwarf anything we have seen so far in the Gaza Strip since 7 October 2023,” the FRC said Friday.
Indirect health dangers
The Lancet magazine, the global health industry’s foremost academic publication, warned in July indirect deaths from the conflict could expand the final death toll to between three and 15 times the number of direct deaths.
“Armed conflicts have indirect health implications beyond the direct harm from violence. Even if the conflict ends immediately, there will continue to be many indirect deaths in the coming months and years from causes such as reproductive, communicable, and non-communicable diseases. The total death toll is expected to be large given the intensity of this conflict; destroyed health-care infrastructure; severe shortages of food, water, and shelter; the population’s inability to flee to safe places; and the loss of funding to UNRWA, one of the very few humanitarian organisations still active in the Gaza Strip.
“In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths,” The Lancet said.

Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death, and presuming the direct death toll is 53 552, that throws up a horrifying 214 000 deaths due to Israel’s genocide. If the ratio, given the straitened circumstances created by Israel’s wiliness to kill anything that moves, is 15 times the total today, then 803 280 people could die in a genocide that could have been stopped dead, any day, by the US refusing to continue arming the murder and providing it with all the diplomatic and political protection needed to continue.
‘Missing’ stuck on 10 000
Many indicators point to the “official” toll severely undercounting the actual dead numbers. The 10 000 missing under the rubble was a figure put out in February when abut 35% of Gaza’s buildings had been destroyed.
It has remained stuck on that figure ever since. However, now at least 66% of buildings are in ruins and no change has accounted for that.
Reuters reported last month the destruction has left about 42 million tons of rubble piled up where houses, masaajid and schools used to stand. It will take about 14 years to clear it.
“There is massive destruction throughout the Strip but the worst-hit area is northern Gaza, with 36,611 buildings damaged in Gaza City, according to UNOSAT. The southern city of Khan Younis is the second worst affected area, UNOSAT data showed, with more than 19,000 buildings damaged,” Reuters reported.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs says between 75,000 and 95,000 people live in northern Gaza.
The Famine Review Committee stated that it is likely starvation, malnutrition, and excess deaths from malnutrition and disease are growing rapidly in northern Gaza, adding, “Famine thresholds may have already been crossed or else will be in the near future.”

Looking away
Al-Mayadeen says Saturday, as a testament to “Israel’s” starvation policy in Gaza, “senior Israeli security officials recently told Israeli newspaper Haaretz that, with no other options being considered, the government is working toward ‘annexing large portions of Gaza’.
Europe looked away when Hitler had his Holocaust and it’s looking away again today as Netanyahu has his.
The media coverage of the Maccabi Tel Aviv football violence that followed the club’s match in Amsterdam Thursday night told all you needed to know about expected responses to Israeli violence – the Palestinians will be blamed.