Main points: - Trends in both the overall death toll and the post-ceasefire period specifically remain consistent: Adult men and older teenage boys make up an increasingly disproportionate share of deaths relative to their population proportion. They make up an even higher proportion of deaths added since the October 2025 ceasefire, indicating their share of the toll will continue to rise. - Since the ceasefire, the majority of added deaths (over 65%) continue to come from processed family reports. These deaths skew towards earlier stages of the war, indicating that the MOH casualty-recording system recovered substantially after suffering a severe reduction in capacity in Oct-Nov 2023. The scale and pace of added deaths does not support studies that project a severe undercount of the death toll in Gaza. - The Hamas-run MOH death toll list has effectively complete information for the deaths it reports, but continued removals and re-additions to the list indicate the list is still in flux. - The usual questions about possible inclusion of violent deaths not caused by the IDF or natural deaths, as well as the failure to distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths, remain a sharp limitation on analysis. - Major unknowns remain, including the scope of deaths not yet recorded by the MOH, whether due to inaccessibility or non-reporting and the number of missing persons and their disposition. The extent that these categories overlap with deaths already reported via the family reporting mechanism, which has long included options for reporting deaths without a body, is also unclear. - Most of the militant groups in Gaza have begun releasing significant numbers of militant obituaries since the October ceasefire, though these releases skew towards commanders and amount to a small fraction of total estimated combatant deaths assessed by the IDF. Many of those claimed by the groups would have been otherwise undetectable via OSINT techniques. Time and the militant groups’ continued willingness to publish obituaries will determine how much can be learned in this bottom-up process. - Likely future trends include: a minor-to-moderate increase in the share of adult men in the death toll; a continuing decline in the pace of additions to the death toll, either from new deaths or the addition of older ones; and an expanded picture of militant casualties (including child combatants, dual civilian roles, etc.) thanks to official and family acknowledgements. All of the above conclusions are subject to revision as new data is published.

Sources: The Iraq Body Count post, which presented the data in a PDF and ordered by ascending ID number, is here: zenodo.org/records/21208910 (archive link: archive.org/details/moh-deat…) I turned the list into a spreadsheet and reordered it by age, removed conversion artifacts, and conducted basic error and demographic processing on the data. The original PDF should always be used to confirm exact names in case there are leftover errors from the conversion to a spreadsheet. The original and cleaned-up/analyzed versions of the spreadsheet are available in this workbook (warning that this is a direct download link): archive.org/download/moh-dea… This list is archived alongside all other public MOH death toll list iterations here: archive.org/details/moh-deat… Parts of the analysis reference the May 31, 2026 iteration of the “MOH Dashboard”, which can be found on the MOH website here: sehatty.ps/ The current version and all previous iterations are archived here: archive.org/details/moh-dash… Gaza MOH Telegram: t.me/MOHMediaGaza/ Government Media Office: t.me/mediagovps/ Gaza Civil Defense: t.me/dcdgaza Referenced studies: Jamuladdine et al. (2025): thelancet.com/journals/lance… Spagat et al. (2026): thelancet.com/journals/langl… Oxfam Report (2026): oxfam.org/en/research/buildi… All other links will be provided in the replies to the relevant post.

Caveats: Like all published MOH lists, the November list does not distinguish between civilians and combatants and attributes all listed deaths uniformly to Israeli action. Nor does it include dates of death (no list has) or collection methodology (some earlier iterations did). This analysis is largely focused on the MOH death toll list itself and trends therein, rather than broader questions about combatant deaths or civilian-combatant ratios. Much of my other work focuses on bottom-up identification of specific combatants, which cannot provide a comprehensive account but can help range estimates.

The new list contains 72,835 reported deaths, all but one of which have complete information (99.9986%), meaning a name, sex classification, age, and valid ID number. As I’ve written before, however, completeness -- data in every category -- is just one measure of data quality. Validity (whether or not someone's DOB/age/sex/ID data is correct) and accuracy (whether or not they belong on the list -- meaning their death was violent and due directly to the war) are key, and harder to assess. They require open-source work (to establish the circumstances of death where possible) and cross-reference with the Palestinian population registry (accessible only to the governments of the PA, the Hamas-run Gaza government, and Israel). The MOH list itself cannot verify its information.

Of the 72,835 entries on the list, 47.9% are adult men (18-59), 15.3% are adult women (18-59), 29.7% are children (0-17), and 7.1% are elderly (60+). Replacing the MOH’s age bracketing with the standard elderly definition of 65 years and older (see L), 49.5% are adult men (18-64), 16.1% are adult women (18-64), 29.7% are children (0-17), and 4.7% are elderly (65+). Of the 4,015 net deaths added to the list between the last public iteration in November 2025 and the new May 2026 version (see R), 56.8% are adult men (18-64). In other words, the share of adult men and older teenage boys (15-17) killed continues to grow. If this trend continues, it is likely that the next iteration of the list will reflect a majority of deaths coming from adult men (18-64).

More recent (though less detailed) casualty data comes from an MOH infographic (L) released in July 2026 which covers up to the end of June and reflects these same proportions. That infographic also included, for the first time in months, partially disaggregated injury data which indicated that adult men (18-59) made up 53% of injuries, a more significant overrepresentation than among deaths. This makes clear that the persistent claim that 70% of those injured in Gaza were women and children, most recently replicated in a July 2026 Oxfam report (R), are inaccurate.

The demographics demonstrate a much higher share of adult men (18-64) and older teenage boys in the death toll relative to their share of the population (the light gray bars on the chart at left) and a much lower share of women and children. The share of men and older teenage boys continues to grow over time, and males aged 15-45 account for 33,268 (45.7%) of currently recorded deaths, compared to an estimated 24.7% share of Gaza’s pre-war population. Relative overrepresentation of men is particularly pronounced among those 18-45, who are 3.35 times more likely to have died than women of that same age range. Men 18-45 likely make up the overwhelming majority of combatants, alongside some proportion of older teenage boys and older men.

Official claims by at least two militant groups — Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) — make clear that older teenage boys (15+) were routinely recruited as rank-and-file combatants. Posts by family members also indicate this was a practice shared by Hamas and the Mujahideen Brigades. The scope of child militants is unknown and will likely vary by militant group, but will become clearer if official militant obituary releases continue. This data should not, in my view, be used to make broad claims about the cause of the imbalance in teenage boys and girls killed in Gaza, which is substantial: boys 0-14 are 1.26 times more likely to have been killed than girls of the same age range, but that rises sharply to 2.85 for those ages 15-19. That is a judgment that can be built from the ground up (albeit imperfectly) with the unusually detailed picture from Gaza. Leveling charges that someone was a militant is a serious matter and should not be done in the absence of clear indications or in a general demographic assessment.

The list remains in significant flux, with 453 entries removed and 258 re-added between November 2025 and May 2026. The removed and re-added entries do not differ too significantly in demographics, and are so small in absolute terms that they barely affect the overall death toll demographics. However, this serves as a reminder that the list is an evolving dataset, even beyond new additions, and still contains deaths it should not while missing others that should be included. In one clear example of that, the Hamas-run Government Media Office issued an appeal in June 2026 (bottom R) for those who had been erroneously listed as dead to contact the Ministry of Health directly to be removed from the list. There may also be cases, as the message noted, of simple mistakes in the data where names and ID numbers have been inadvertently swapped between entries, something which would be undetectable without access to the population registry. The rate of such errors is impossible to assess from the outside, since the entry would still appear to have a valid ID and complete information. See the chart below (bottom L) showing all additions/removals/re-additions since June 2024, or view an interactive version here: public.flourish.studio/visua…

Post-ceasefire trends have also remained consistent, with periodic bulk updates of family-reported deaths from earlier in the war continuing to make up over two-thirds of newly added deaths. New deaths constitute the next-largest category, accounting for some 18.7% of the total, followed by recovered bodies (12.0%), which have diminished to almost nothing despite ongoing recovery operations. That is likely due both to many recovered bodies having already been reported as dead via the family reporting mechanism and the forensic difficulty of identifying bodies with limited resources such a long time after death.

Additions to the death toll from bulk processing of family reports have slowed substantially over time (L), both in pace and quantity. Family-reported deaths also remain heavily skewed towards the first six months of the war (R), where they made up 25% of all currently reported deaths (according to MOH dashboard data covering up to May 31, 2026). After that point, family reports drop off drastically and make up only 8% of reported deaths for the remained of the war, indicating a recovery in the MOH’s casualty-reporting system. Contrary to popular belief, the casualty-reporting system continued to operate throughout the war.

Neither the absolute number of deaths added to the toll post-ceasefire nor the diminishing pace of such additions support studies which projected very large undercounts. A 2025 Lancet study (Jamaluddine et al, top and bottom L) which used a capture-recapture model (improperly, in my view) projected that 64,260 violent deaths had occurred in Gaza between October 7, 2023 and June 31, 2024. Currently, MOH data indicates that that figure is 41,333, a 22,927 death gap. That’s over 8x the total number of deaths (2,704) added to the October 2023-June 2024 by the MOH since February 2025. A 2026 Lancet study (Spagat et al, top and bottom R) which used a household mortality survey yielded a central estimate of 75,200 violent deaths between October 7, 2023 and January 5, 2025, which would leave a rough gap of 23,147 deaths according to current MOH data for that time period. That works out to over 4x the total number of deaths (5,537) added to that time period by the MOH since February 2025. In both cases, the known real count for deaths remains far lower than even the bottom of the projected confidence interval for each study. For the 2025 capture-recapture study, it is over 5.1 standard deviations below the central estimate, and for the 2026 mortality survey study, 4 standard deviations below the central estimate. Given the decreasing rate of additions to the death toll, these projections appear increasingly implausible.

The remaining areas of uncertainty—the number of unrecovered and uncounted deaths and the number of missing persons who are deceased—also do not support claims of a severe undercount. Estimates of the number of unrecovered bodies stand at around 8,000, according to Gaza’s Civil Defense (L), and the current version of the MOH dashboard lists 3,673 missing persons (R), some of whom are likely alive but imprisoned in Israel or mistakenly still listed missing. Even if these categories are combined and with the assumption that all listed persons are dead and belong on the MOH list (i.e. died as a result of IDF action), this would not come close to the sort of undercount argued for by the aforementioned studies.

The questions of whether or not violent deaths not attributable to the IDF or natural deaths are included in the list remain unresolved. A number of cases I previously identified of deaths due to accidents, crime, or infighting inside Gaza remain on the list, and I have identified several more. However, malnutrition deaths appear to be excluded from the MOH death toll list, and the situation with natural deaths remains unclear. It’s hard to conclude more without case-by-case analysis. x.com/GabrielEpsteinX/status… x.com/GabrielEpsteinX/status… x.com/GabrielEpsteinX/status…

While the MOH list does not distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths, much more has come to light about militant deaths since the October 2025 ceasefire. Most Gaza militant groups have released significant numbers of obituaries (over 1,000 for PIJ and over 1,600 for Hamas on their main obituary channels alone -- examples below), while semi-official or general martyrs’ channels and relatives and friends have posted many more. It's become clear that there is massive militant presence on the MOH list, but that many deaths also remain unrecorded. However, these still remain a fraction of the militant deaths estimated by the IDF, and in many cases there was no public evidence of someone’s militant affiliation prior to being claimed by the group. This is particularly true of rank-and-file and younger militants, meaning that we are largely reliant on the level of information militant groups and family members are willing to release to try and assess combatant deaths. In other words, an unusually detailed but inherently warped picture of combatant deaths can be built which oversamples commanders and older militants. This ongoing process requires significant and sustained effort to catalogue and analyze, likely over a number of years, and is not likely to yield a full picture of combatant deaths. However, it can provide a better sense of the plausibility of IDF claims related to combatant deaths.

I’ve written before about why I’m skeptical of using broad demographic arguments to try and estimate the number of combatants killed, and I remain so. Simply assuming that surplus deaths of military-aged men (in other words, however many more men were killed than women in a specific age range) reflects militant deaths is unfounded. In general, civilian men die more than women in war. However, that general trend should not be overplayed. Gaza is a very heavily militarized population, with 10% or more of the adult male population in the 18-45 range (~420,000 people) involved with militant groups (combining the pre-war strength of the groups with reported mass recruitment drives throughout the war). In the U.S., by comparison, under 3% of the adult male population in that age range is part of the military. The nature of fighting in Gaza also has unique features that would affect the conventional wisdom of more civilian men dying than women. The fighting took two primary forms: a large-scale air campaign of targeted killings which often killed relatives of the target, and a more tactical air-and-ground campaign that would have caused much lower civilian casualties due to operating in more open or already-evacuated areas. In the case of the targeted killing campaign, I have observed that in many cases multiple men from the extended family were militants, even if there was a clear primary target (usually an older man who held a command role). In other words, in the strategic air campaign, there will be higher civilian casualties that skew towards women and children (since male relatives are more likely to be combatants and/or the primary target of the strike), while in the tactical air and ground campaign, there should be fewer male or female civilian casualties overall. These factors would be expected to depress the ratio of civilian men to women killed. The combination of them makes me skeptical that models estimating combatant deaths which assume a substantial surplus of civilian male deaths relative to female ones are well-fitted to Gaza and this particular type of warfare.

Most of the trends detailed above are very stable, and it’s important to consider how they operate in concert. The overrepresentation of adult men and older teenage boys in the toll, and their even more substantial overrepresentation in newly added deaths, means that their share of the death toll will continue to grow. However, since progressively fewer deaths are being added to the toll, the impact that this will have on overall death toll demographics is going to be small to moderate. It’s very likely that adult men (18-64) will soon make up an outright majority of overall deaths. Second, the declining rate of newly added deaths militates against much higher death toll projections. There are some factors that might result in a moderate increase in added deaths: IDF withdrawal allowing recovery of possibly unreported bodies from outlying areas; mass recognition of many missing persons as killed, etc. But given the known contours of the remaining possible areas of uncounted deaths, claims of large undercounts do not match the data. More information and time will fill in some but not all gaps. Increasing combatant identification will allow for better assessments of the viable range of civilian-combatant ratios, revised assessments of specific incidents, and increased understanding of the level of penetration militant groups had in the Gaza internal security forces and municipalities, medical and education sectors, and media, among other areas.