Israel accepts Gaza’s 70,000 death toll: A record of denialism, lies

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After more than two years of bombarding Gaza, Israel’s military appears to have accepted the death toll in the enclave that the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza has been compiling, painstakingly and against the odds.

Since the start of its genocidal war on Gaza on October 7, 2023, Israel has repeatedly dismissed, denied or downplayed the scale of death and devastation in the territory documented by journalists, Palestinians and Gaza’s authorities. It has at times issued its own statistics on people killed, then changed them, while accusing Palestinians and Gaza officials of exaggerating the death toll, especially of civilians.

What do we know about the real number of dead and injured in Gaza?

Since Israel’s war on Gaza began in October 2023, the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza has been counting the number of dead bodies by recording their names and keeping a track of ID numbers.

The Health Ministry has also recorded the number of people injured and the number of people who have starved to death as a result of Israel cutting off vital aid supplies to Gaza during the war.

As of January 27, the ministry said that at least 171,428 people were injured in the war and 1,350 more have been injured since the ceasefire.

The United Nations and human rights groups have also backed the Health Ministry’s figures.

Human rights organisations have also accused Israeli forces of deliberately targeting civilians.

In particular, between May and July 2025, more than 1,000 Palestinian people were killed by the Israeli military at United States-led food distribution sites, according to the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor and a retired US special forces officer, Anthony Aguilar.

Aguilar was formerly employed by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a nonprofit backed by the US and Israel to provide those distribution sites, after Israel accused the United Nations Palestinian refugee authority, UNRWA, of aiding Hamas.

“Without question, I witnessed war crimes by the [Israeli military],” Aguilar told the BBC in an exclusive interview in 2025.

How has Israel responded to these figures?

During its war on Gaza, Israel mostly rejected these figures and claimed they were misleading or manipulated.

Israeli army officials have also denied the claims that civilians were targeted at food distribution sites in 2025, instead claiming that “chaos” at the sites posed an “immediate threat” to its soldiers, forcing them to fire shots.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has also repeatedly denied allegations that Israeli forces deliberately targeted civilians in Gaza, and argued that such claims amount to “blood libel” against Israel, and referred to a false and anti-Semitic accusation that Jewish people murder Christian children to use their blood in religious rituals.

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.

An April 2024 investigation carried out by the independent magazine +972, which reports on news from Israel and Palestine, revealed that an Israeli army artificial intelligence targeting system codenamed Lavender had marked tens of thousands of people in Gaza as potential fighters and eligible to be killed, according to Israeli intelligence sources.

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

Throughout the war, Israel’s military released its own death toll figures, refuting the Gaza Health Ministry’s figures. But it kept changing its figures.

On October 7, Israeli authorities initially said Hamas-led fighters killed 1,400 people in their attack on southern Israel, apart from taking more than 200 people captive. However, later, Israel reduced its death toll to fewer than 1,150. Meanwhile, reports in Israeli publications like Haaretz suggested that at least some of those killed in Israel that day might have been shot dead by the Israeli military themselves, as part of a controversial policy known as the Hannibal Directive, aimed at preventing the enemy from taking captives.

In November 2023, a senior Israeli security official suggested that Israel had killed 20,000 people in Gaza, most of them 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.

Why is Israel acknowledging the death toll now?

Thursday’s announcement from Israel acknowledging the 70,000 death toll in Gaza follows more than two years of repeatedly trying to deny or undermine the number of deaths in the enclave.

Sultan Barakat, senior professor in public policy at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Doha, told Al Jazeera that it was important to understand why Israel might be now acknowledging the scale of deaths in Gaza.

“As always, the devil is in the details,” he said. “Internationally, increased access to the field by the UN and other humanitarian agencies – including those from some Israeli allied states [the US, United Kingdom, France, and others] – along with the beginning of rubble removal [in Gaza], made continued outright rejection untenable [for Israel],” he said.

“At this stage, partial acceptance can help preserve institutional credibility and signal seriousness to key partners, particularly the US and European governments,” he added.

Barakat noted that there might also be a strategic recalibration under way.

“Accepting the figures allows Israel to reposition its argument in the international arena, especially as recent developments around the “Board of Peace” have shifted global attention away from the question of whether genocide and mass death occurred and toward reconstruction – reframing the debate around responsibility and the circumstances of those deaths,” he said.

He added that this includes placing an emphasis on Hamas’s conduct, the conditions of urban warfare, or the use of civilian infrastructure.

“Lastly, this acceptance may serve a defensive legal purpose. Acknowledging the scale of harm does not necessarily imply acceptance of wrongdoing, but it can form part of constructing a more coherent record in anticipation of future investigations, inquiries or legal proceedings,” he added.

This shift – from outright denial to changing numbers to acceptance of some facts – is part of a pattern.

Israel’s record of denialism

Besides denying the death toll during its war on Gaza in the past, Israel has also denied accusations by the media and human rights groups that it has killed children and journalists in both Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

Hind Rajab, five-year-old child

On January 29, 2024, after five-year-old Hind Rajab was killed when an Israeli tank targeted her family’s car in Gaza, Israel denied its soldiers were in the area. After the rest of her family had been killed, Hind pleaded with rescue workers on the phone for three hours for help, before she, too, was shot dead. During her phone call, she described a “tank” drawing up next to the car.

When rescuers found the remains of Hind and her family on February 10, the car was riddled with bullet holes likely coming from more than one direction. It was later determined that more than 300 bullets had been fired into the car.

But a statement from the Israeli army read, “It appears that … troops were not present near the vehicle or within firing range of the described vehicle in which the girl was found,” according to a Times of Israel report.

In February 2024, Sanad, Al Jazeera’s investigations unit, however, analysed phone records and satellite imagery to determine whether Israeli troops had, in fact, been near the car.

The vehicle, the investigation found, had been stopped by the Israeli military near a petrol station in Tal al-Hawa in the early afternoon on January 29.

Other investigative media outlets also questioned Israel’s claims regarding Hind’s death, and the US, Israel’s number-one ally, called for probes into the killing of Hind, her family, and the medics who were sent to try and save them.

The Israeli army has since told the BBC that Hind’s case is still being reviewed by Israel’s Fact-Finding Assessment Mechanism (FFAM) — in effect, pulling back from its initial full-throated rejection of the possibility of an Israeli tank having fired at the car.

Palestinian girl Hind Rajab poses for a photograph, in this undated handout picture

Shireen Abu Akleh, Al Jazeera journalist

Israel issued similar denials when Al Jazeera’s journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, a US and Palestinian citizen, was killed while reporting from Jenin in the occupied West Bank on May 11, 2022. Shireen had been wearing her “press” jacket. Autopsy results later showed she was shot at medium range in the head by a sniper, just below the rim of her helmet.

Witnesses, including Al Jazeera journalists, said Israeli forces had carried out the shooting, a claim that was later backed up by numerous investigations by media outlets, human rights organisations, and the United Nations.

But Israel sought to evade responsibility, initially claiming that she had been caught in crossfire from Palestinian fighters. However, video footage from the incident shows the street Abu Akleh was standing on was mostly quiet, and no such fighters were in her near vicinity.

In September that year, following a military investigation, Israel changed its stance, acknowledging that it was “highly possible” that one of its soldiers had fired the bullet that killed Abu Akleh. However, the military ruled out any further investigation, saying they found no evidence of a criminal offence.

In June 2022, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights also said Shireen was killed by Israel, but Israel called the UN report biased.

On May 11, 2023, however, an Israeli army spokesperson was asked by CNN whether the military was “ready” to apologise for her murder.

“I think it’s an opportunity for me to say here that we are very sorry of the death of the late Shireen Abu Akleh,” the spokesperson, Daniel Hagari, responded.

Shireen’s family say they are still seeking accountability.

Ambulance workers in Gaza

On March 30, 2025, the bodies of five Palestinian Civil Defence responders, a UN employee and eight Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) workers were discovered in a shallow grave in Gaza. A ninth PRCS ambulance driver, Assaad al-Nassasra, was being held by Israel, the PRCS confirmed later. In total, 15 emergency workers had been killed – with one body found a few days earlier.

It was later determined that at about 4am (01:00 GMT) on March 23, a Palestinian ambulance had been dispatched to join an earlier one helping people injured in an Israeli air strike in Rafah’s al-Hashaashin area.

Contact with the ambulance was lost and, at 5am, the first ambulance went back out to find it. Paramedics radioed back that they could see casualties on the ground on the way to Tal as-Sultan, another area in southern Gaza.

Two more ambulances were dispatched along with a fire truck and other emergency vehicles. They came under Israeli gunfire for more than five minutes. Minutes later, soldiers also fired at a United Nations car that had stopped at the scene. The PRCS lost contact with its team.

A video later found on the phone of slain paramedic Rifaat Radwan showed the team’s final moments. Filmed from inside one of the last two ambulances to head out, it shows a fire truck and ambulances driving ahead through the night.

All vehicles were clearly identified with emergency lights flashing.

The vehicles stopped when they reached an ambulance and bodies by the roadside, and first responders in reflective uniforms exited the vehicles. Moments later, intense gunfire erupted.

However, Israel initially claimed its soldiers opened fire because the convoy approached “suspiciously” in darkness without headlights or flashing lights. It said the movement of the vehicles had not been previously coordinated or agreed with the army. The video footage clearly shows the ambulances with their lights on.

The day after the attack on the ambulance, Israeli forces blocked all entry to the site where it occurred. But a few days later, UN and Palestinian officials gained limited access to the area, and managed to recover buried vehicles and the body of a Gaza civil defence member.

Then, they discovered a shallow grave with 14 bodies of emergency workers. It later transpired that Israeli troops had bulldozed over the bodies and their vehicles.

In April, the Israeli military appeared to climb down from its claims, and described the killings – as well as the burial of victims and their vehicles – as a “professional error” and a “misunderstanding”.

An investigative report from Israel found that the soldiers failed to recognise the ambulances due to “poor night visibility” and because flashing lights are less visible on night-vision drones and goggles.

It also blamed a now-dismissed deputy commander, saying he mistakenly thought an ambulance was being used by Hamas and opened fire first.

It denied that burying vehicles and bodies was an attempt to conceal the attack.

What is the point of denying such incidents?

Barakat told Al Jazeera this pattern of denial in the first instance by Israel is not unique, as information warfare is a “real consideration” in every conflict.

“The United States employed similar practices in both Afghanistan and Iraq,” he said “However, based on Israel’s wars in Gaza, Lebanon and elsewhere, this behaviour appears to follow a recurring pattern of obfuscation and deceive, aimed at creating confusion while restricting opportunities for independent verification, particularly by international media.”

He noted that Israel, like the US and other militaries conducting offensive operations, also tends to be extremely cautious in the early stages of reporting during active conflict.

“Initial denials or non-acceptance are often framed as the result of a need for internal intelligence verification, particularly when figures originate from adversarial authorities such as the Gaza Health Ministry,” he said.

He added that there are also legal and diplomatic dimensions to Israel’s behaviour.

“Early acceptance of responsibility or casualty figures [in Israel’s war on Gaza] could have had consequences for cases brought against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and International Criminal Court (ICC),” he said.

“Delaying acknowledgement allowed Israel time to assess its legal exposure and coordinate messaging with allies.”

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