The Zionist entity has killed between 65,000 and 680,000 Palestinians in Gaza since October 7. The range is staggering, although the larger number is not necessarily the ceiling; it is simply the one we know of.
The first number comes from the Gaza Ministry of Health, which collates data on every single martyr, including their full name, ID number, age, place of residence, birthday, and gender. In a Drop Site interview with Dr. Zaher al-Wahaidi, the Director of the Information Center, he describes how the identity of each martyr is corroborated and counted by every hospital that receives the injured. Not included in the number are those trapped underneath the rubble of collapsed buildings or those who die “indirect deaths.” These include children who are starved to death, cancer patients who can’t access treatment, or those who are killed by disease because of a collapsed healthcare system. The only ones they count in the official toll are those killed by the impact of a missile.
680,000 is the new projected death toll, based on the rate, longevity, and intensity of Zionist brutality. Many have now assumed that number in their vocabulary, rightfully arguing that 65,000 is such a severe undercount that reciting it is itself a form of genocide denial.
The only confirmed fact is that there is no confirmed death toll in Gaza. We know that the statistic shared by the Ministry of Health is the minimum number. We have seen too many mass graves, children vaporized by Israeli bombs, and Telegram posts sharing daily lists of martyrs for the rate of killing to stagnate this much. We know that those who count our martyrs have been martyred themselves, that the targeted killing of journalists has created an information blackout, and that the infrastructure needed to account for the dead has been decimated. In November, only one month after the genocide began, the Israeli army invaded al-Shifa and al-Rantisi hospitals, which operated as the central data centers for the Ministry of Health, leading to a breakdown in counting the dead. Because of the extent of the violence Zionism has inflicted on the people of Gaza, we do not know how many Palestinians have been killed.
Statistics have become the measure of genocide, the means through which we have evaluated its scale — and for our enemies to question its reality. In a particularly egregious op-ed, The New York Times’s Bret Stephens opines, “No, Israel Is Not Committing Genocide in Gaza,” asking why the death toll isn’t in the hundreds of thousands. Sixty thousand, he implies, is just the fate of being Arab, and the only way the Palestinian can live is if he dies prematurely.
The stagnating death toll has forced a temporal shift in Palestine’s statistics, displacing Gaza’s suffering from an accounting of the past into a projection of the future. The 80 percent of Gaza’s homes that Israel has bombed are now understood by the 100 years it will take to rebuild the coastal city. The extent of destroyed neighborhoods is quantified by the 10–15 years it will take to remove the rubble. And rather than attempt to arrive at an accurate death toll, researchers are now predicting how many Palestinians in Gaza will be killed after the war’s official end.
On June 19 last year, The Lancet published an article that attempted to account for all of Palestine’s dead. In it, using a formula of 3–15 “indirect deaths” for every “direct death,” the article projected that “without a ceasefire,” over 186,000 Palestinians could be estimated to have been killed by the end of the war. I, along with many others, misread what these numbers actually reflected: I assumed that the Lancet was updating the death toll in Gaza and not predicting its fatal outcome if a ceasefire would not be reached. It wasn’t that 186,000 Palestinians were now dead; it was that they would die.
Beyond the incomprehensibility of the report’s framing of a six-digit number, I was troubled by it. For one, we know that there is no such thing as an indirect death. Starvation, disease, and the decimation of healthcare infrastructure are the technologies of violence deployed by Israel to directly eradicate Palestinians from Gaza. This is the logic of genocide: Destroy everything that sustains life, and the natural result will be exponentially more death.
More disturbingly, their projection began to function as a prophecy that forces a new distinction on the Palestinian: the killed and the not-yet-killed. The imprecision of the martyr toll puts us in a morbid double bind: if we undercount our martyrs, we condemn them to a realm of non-existence. If we overcount, we condemn them to a predetermined death.
But even if we possessed an accurate number, we wouldn’t understand the depth of its meaning. Can we conceptualize 680,000 martyrs when visualizing 65,000 is itself an impossible task? Statistics erase, blur, ambiguate, and rob. I think of how visceral my affective response to the individual stories of martyrs is, that extrapolating it a thousand times over is an impossibility that will inevitably dull those feelings. Muhammad Bhar, for example, was the young man with Down Syndrome who was killed after Israeli soldiers unleashed dogs on him. As they mauled him to death, Muhammad, who was non-verbal for the majority of his life, uttered his final words: “Khalas, ya habibi” — “enough, my love.” Numbers are by nature de-individuating and reduce life to an arithmetic equation, to the cold sign of 1. Our martyrs become indistinguishable because of the way numbers homogenize life into a set of data points.
Figures cannot communicate the pain Muhammad felt, cannot communicate the permanence of death, or differentiate between the Palestinian killed on October 8 and the Palestinian killed today. They cannot relay Palestinian suffering as interconnected, how this number of Palestinians are not just displaced, and this number of Palestinians are not just sick, or just hungry, but that these Palestinians are sick and hungry and displaced and injured, or perhaps sick because they are hungry, injured because they are displaced.
Statistics cannot tell us anything about how the living are either grieving or condemned to die. A death toll cannot even count the dead. The number does not reveal the many lives destroyed, the love that now has nowhere to go, it does not reveal the grief, and rage, and heartbreak, and exhaustion, and the many self-written eulogies that we read every day. It is painfully inadequate — yet we still count, determined to know how many there are.
We often hear the defiant proclamation: “We are not numbers.” As Dr. al-Wahaidi says in his interview, “Each of these individuals is more than just a number; each one carries a unique story, a profound tragedy, a home filled with memories, and a family left grieving — don’t they deserve to be remembered?” But Zionism has devastated Gaza to such a degree that the number doesn’t exist. The range of martyrs is so vast that we are forced to be imprecise. Such imprecision disappears the Palestinians, forces them into non-existence, and condemns them to death. This is Zionism’s foundation and operating logic. Their colonial ambitions force a singular purpose onto the millions of Palestinians who have lived since the Balfour Declaration: to disappear and to die.
We desire to know the number even if it is incomprehensible, even if what it represents terrifies us or reminds us of our abject failure, and even if we are painfully aware that it is neither accurate nor fully encompassing. I understand our fixation, though I’m not sure where it comes from.
Perhaps it’s a sign of respect, or maybe it offers us a semblance of control over the narrative of the genocide. How are we to avenge our martyrs if we don’t know how many there are? How will we stop the world from spinning and move masses to action if we don’t possess an accurate statistic? Were we to be without a number, we might search elsewhere to prove that they were here, that they lived, and that they matter still.
A version of this essay was originally published in the twentieth issue of the New York War Crimes ‘Two Years.’