Zero famine deaths and 60,000 newborns – IDF rebuts claims of Gaza genocide

IDF confirms estimates of 70,000 fatalities in Gaza war, including 25,000 terrorists, as Israeli military says not a single famine death could be confirmed, while number of live births tops pre-war level.

By World Israel News Staff

Israel’s military said Thursday that it estimates that roughly 70,000 people have been killed in the Gaza Strip since the beginning of the war with Hamas in October 2023, similar to the figures provided by the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry.

However, the IDF and the Gaza health ministry differ sharply in their estimates of the number of civilians killed during the war. Hamas officials have claimed that approximately 70% of the 71,400 deaths reported by its health ministry were women or children – a figure challenged by independent analyses, most of which place the number under 50%.

The IDF has estimated that at least 25,000 terrorists were killed, according to The Jerusalem Post, reflecting a 1.8 to 1 ratio of civilian to combatant fatalities. That places the Gaza war within the range of major contemporary conflicts and roughly equal to an approximately 2 to 1 ratio reported in the war in Iraq.

Despite a campaign promoting claims of mass starvation in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli military reported that it could find no evidence of a single death caused by starvation during the war.

On the contrary, the Gaza Strip received large amounts of humanitarian aid during the war, with some 112,000 aid truck shipments delivered including 1,700,000 tons of food – or nearly two pounds of food per person per day – and 1,800,000 tents. Some 600,000 children were vaccinated against polio during the war.

Wikipedia’s entry on allegations of genocide in the Gaza Strip falsely claims 10,000 famine-related deaths in the Strip, based upon claims made in an August 2025 blog post by The World Peace Foundation.

The IDF also rebutted claims made against Israel as part of international cases probing alleged genocide in the Gaza Strip that Israel intentionally worked to lower the number of live births in the coastal enclave.

Approximately 60,000 live births were reported in Gaza in 2025, the IDF said, higher than the pre-war level of just over 57,000 in 2022 – despite the fact that the total population of the Gaza Strip fell by an estimated 6% during the war, according to the Palestinian Authority’s statistics agency.