680,000 dead in Gaza? Social media eats up nonsensical analysis

A closer look at the authors’ methodology shows it to be amateurish and not reflective of reality.

By Chaim Lax, HonestReporting

The latest anti-Israel libel to spread across social media like a wildfire is the claim that 680,000 people have been killed in Gaza during the near-two years of war between Israel and Hamas, including 380,000 of them being children under the age of 5.

Over the past few days, this astounding claim has been shared by social media accounts with a wide audience, including Middle East Monitor (known for its anti-Israel worldview, support of Hamas, and anti-Israel conspiracy theories), anti-Israel firebrand activist Nerdeen Kiswani, and even has-been actress Rosie O’Donnell.

But where did this mind-boggling number come from?

The claim that Israel has killed one-third of Gaza’s total population originates from a July 2025 piece entitled “Skewering History: The Odious Politics of Counting Gaza’s Dead” for Arena, a far-left Australian magazine.

The piece aims to besmirch the reputation of Israel and its defenders while vindicating the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health.

Its authors conclude that the human cost of the war goes beyond the tens of thousands (combatants and civilians) that the Gaza Ministry of Health counts, and rises to 680,000 people when indirect deaths are included in the casualty statistics.

However, a closer look at the authors’ methodology shows it to be amateurish and not reflective of reality.

The authors rely on a January 2025 Lancet study that determined that the Hamas-run Ministry of Health’s casualty figures were under-reported by 41%.

Thus, according to the authors of the Arena piece, using the Lancet study’s methodology, the number of Gazans who suffered from violent deaths by the end of April 2025 should be 136,000 (roughly 2.5 times more than what Hamas itself was claiming).

However, the Lancet study is not an unimpeachable analysis. In fact, several observers noted issues with the study’s methodology as well as its conclusions.

Analysts like Mark Zlochin and Salo Aizenberg (who also serves as an HonestReporting board member) pointed out at the time that the study’s use of “capture-recapture” to determine the number of Palestinians who had been killed in Gaza was flawed because:

The three casualty lists that were used by the study were intertwined (thus skewing the results).

Its algorithm comparing social media-reported deaths to other casualty lists was faulty in 30% of cases.

The authors disregarded analytic models that showed the estimated casualty figures to be lower.

If there were 136,000 violent deaths in Gaza up until April 2025, there must be 544,000 non-violent deaths linked to the conflict, according to the authors’ Lancet-inspired calculations.

The authors reach this conclusion by assuming a “conservative” estimate of non-violent deaths being four times the number of violent deaths in the conflict.

They reach this estimate by looking at the ratio of violent-to-non-violent deaths in other conflicts.

However, as pointed out by Mark Zlochin when a Lancet correspondence made similar claims, “unless there was a very strong evidence suggesting otherwise,” there is no basis for the 4-times non-violent deaths ratio.

There have been several conflicts where the violent-non-violent death ratio was below four, including zero in the Kosovo conflict.

It should also be noted that the Hamas-provided casualty lists include some who were not killed by Israel but instead died of illness, in accidents, etc.

Thus, the whole assumption that there are four times as many non-violent deaths as there are violent deaths during this war is unfounded and does not seemingly reflect the reality in the Gaza Strip.

To illustrate how removed from reality this study is, one aspect of its conclusions has been particularly subject to ridicule: the claim that 380,000 children under the age of 5 have been killed during the war.

This claim is absurd, as the latest estimate for the under-5 population of Gaza was 341,790. Thus, this study claims that more children under the age of 5 were killed than exist in the Gaza Strip.

Clearly, this piece does not stand up under the slightest scrutiny.

But perhaps that was the point. These two “academics” chose not to publish their piece in a scholarly journal (where it would be subject to academic oversight) but in a political magazine that published such anti-Israel analysis weeks after the October 7 attacks as “Who has the right to self-defence, the occupier or the occupied?” and “Critical Attitudes to Israeli Colonialism and the Diversity of Nazi Victims in Popular Culture.”

This piece, from its faulty analysis to its baseless conclusions (such as Israel’s campaign in Gaza is worse than a 1944 Nazi massacre in Italy), is not a serious work of analysis but a piece of propaganda meant to influence those who don’t look past the headline that presents Israel as a rogue monster.

Based on the popularity that this article has garnered over the past few days on social media, it appears that the authors have unfortunately been successful in fulfilling their propagandizing purpose, much to the detriment of real academic research and the Israeli war against Hamas.