Why So Many Of Gaza’s Dead Have Been Buried, But Not Counted
The death toll is far higher than reported, but Israel forced it into underreporting.
In Gaza, the dead do not count unless they come with paperwork. That is not a figure of speech. Since the first weeks of Israel's war on the Palestinian people, thousands of confirmed deaths have been barred from the official death toll because the bodies could not be tied to a valid Gaza ID number.
Early in the genocide, after a wave of Western media attacks on the reported Palestinian death toll, Israel and its allies fixated on one technical detail. The Gaza Health Ministry included people who had been killed but were not yet formally identified. Under international pressure, the ministry was forced to split its numbers into two categories:
Deaths with ID numbers were recorded at hospitals and matched against the civil registry
Deaths without ID numbers were confirmed by families, first responders, neighbors, or eyewitnesses but were not officially recognized
Only the first group was allowed into the official death count. The second group was silenced, despite the fact that everyone knew they were dead.
The results were horrifying. When entire families were wiped out by Israeli airstrikes, there was often no one left to retrieve documents from the rubble. Victims were buried quickly in mass graves to prevent disease. Hospitals were under constant bombardment and could not manage systematic ID verification.
Even when everyone in the neighborhood saw someone die, even when bodies were recovered, they were not added to the toll unless paperwork could be produced. That process could take weeks, months, or never happen. Many victims were undocumented children, refugees without civil papers, or people buried so deeply that their IDs were destroyed with them.
By April 2024, nearly half of Gaza's documented fatalities were classified as "media sources," a cynical label for deaths that the ministry knew about but could not officially count. These people had names. They had families. They had funerals. They just did not have documents.
Independent research has since confirmed what Palestinians had been saying from the beginning. The official toll is not just incomplete. It is deliberately suppressed. A peer-reviewed Lancet study using capture-recapture analysis found that the true number of traumatic deaths between October 7, 2023, and June 30, 2024, was about 40 percent higher than the official tally. Another mortality survey suggests the actual number may be far greater.
Israel benefits every time the official toll is lower. From the first days of its campaign, Israeli spokespeople and Western governments used the ID rule to cast doubt on Palestinian suffering. By forcing this system on the Health Ministry, Israel created an artificial ceiling on the number of dead. Not because those people did not die, but because Israel did not want them to be counted.
This is the active erasure of the victims, victims murdered by the Israeli state.
The death toll is one of the few ways the world can measure the scale of Israel's crimes. When that number is manipulated, it does not just change the headlines. It changes how history is written. It slows down international outrage. It protects the occupier.
But Palestinians do not need ID cards to know who they have lost. The families remember. The graves are full. The pain is real. And no amount of paperwork can hide the truth forever.