📊 German Scientists Count Over 100,000 Palestinians Slaughtered in Gaza

German scientists just put a brutal new estimate on the table. It confirms what Palestinians have been screaming for two years.

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The Number the World Doesn’t Want to Say Out Loud

For nearly two years now, we’ve heard people argue about the death toll in Gaza like it’s a sports score.

Israel and its defenders insist the numbers from Gaza’s Health Ministry are exaggerated. Western politicians repeat that line. Major media outlets often quote the ministry “with caveats,” like what they’re really worried about is the risk of overstating Palestinian suffering.

But a new investigation out of Germany just blew past all of that.

In the German publication, DIE ZEIT, journalist Christian Endt reports on research from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Researchi n Rostock. Demographers Ana C. Gómez-Ugarte, Irena Chen, and their colleagues pulled together Gaza Health Ministry data, an independent household survey, and death notices from social media. They used methods that have been peer-reviewed in the journal Population Health Metrics.

Their conclusion: in the first two years of this genocide, between roughly 100,000 and 126,000 people in Gaza have been killed, with a central estimate of 112,069 Palestinians. That’s not propaganda. That’s not a slogan on a protest sign. That’s careful, conservative demographic modeling from one of the most respected research institutes in the world.

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Why the Old Numbers Were Too Low

For a long time, the only official source for Palestinian deaths was the Gaza Health Ministry, which counted about 67,000 dead in the first two years. Because the ministry is under Hamas’s authority, Israel, Western governments, and even parts of the press questioned its credibility.

Here’s what this new research — and earlier work — actually shows:

• There is no evidence that the ministry inflated its numbers.

• Multiple teams, from different institutions, have found that the ministry most likely under-counts the dead.

Why? Because in a place being bombed into dust, you can only count bodies you can physically reach and formally record. The Health Ministry started out counting confirmed deaths with hospital death certificates. As hospitals collapsed, they had to rely more on families reporting deaths, which then had to be verified.

The people who never make it into that system are the ones we fear for the most: those buried under the ruins, families wiped out entirely, elders who die unregistered in shattered neighborhoods.

Researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, led by Zeina Jamaluddine, tried to measure that. They lined up three independent lists of the dead — two from the ministry, one from social media — and looked at how often names matched. From the overlaps and gaps, they estimated that the official ministry tally might be missing around 41 percent of the dead.

Another team led by Michael Spagat at Royal Holloway, University of London, worked with the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. Local women went door to door to 2,000 households around New Year’s 2025 asking who was still alive. That method suggested an undercount of roughly 35 percent.

The Max Planck team took all of this and went further: they broke the estimates down by age and sex, and adjusted for the fact that some groups are less likely to be counted at all.

What they found should stop the world cold.

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The Signature of Genocide

According to the Rostock study, about 27 percent of those killed are children under 15. Around 24 percent are women. The researchers say that this pattern — the way deaths are distributed across age and gender — looks like what the United Nations has seen in past genocides.

That matters more than people realize.

In a typical battle between armed groups, deaths are concentrated among young men — the fighters. That’s what a war looks like.

When you start seeing huge numbers of children and women among the dead, and significant numbers of elders, you’re not looking at a clash of armies anymore. You’re looking at the destruction of a people.

That’s literally how genocide is defined in international law: not just killing, but destroying, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. You don’t have to exterminate every last person to be guilty of genocide. You “only” have to systematically wipe out a huge portion, crush their life chances, and make survival feel impossible.

The Max Planck team also calculated how this genocide has wrecked life expectancy in Gaza. Before the aggression, Palestinians there could expect to live about 77 years (women) and 74 years (men). For 2024, under current conditions, the demographers estimate life expectancy at about 46 for women and 36 for men.

That doesn’t mean every individual will die at that age. It means that if the killing and destruction continue at this pace, that is what an average life looks like for Palestinians in Gaza. That is what it means to erase a people’s future.

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What We Do With This Truth

Let me be very direct with you, family.

For two years, Palestinians have been screaming that this is genocide. Survivors, doctors, journalists, parents — they’ve watched their children die, their neighborhoods flattened, their elders buried, and the world still debate words.

Now we have a leading German institute quietly saying, in effect, the pattern of killing in Gaza matches what we see in genocides. We have a respected newspaper, DIE ZEIT, publishing that more than 100,000 Palestinians have been killed, and that the official figures are conservative.

So what do we do with that?

First, we stop calling this a “war” and pretending it’s a fight between equals. Gaza has no air force, no navy, no tanks. This is one-sided extermination, funded and armed by the United States and its allies.

Second, we push every politician, every government, every institution that still sends weapons or political cover to Israel to face what this research means. Under the Genocide Convention, states have a duty not only not to commit genocide but to prevent it. Continuing to arm and defend Israel in the face of evidence like this is not neutrality. It is complicity.

Finally, we refuse to let this become just another number that people learn to live with. Behind that 112,069 are children who never made it to age ten, mothers killed in their kitchens, elders who survived 1948 only to be buried now in 2024 and 2025.

I have been doing this work long enough to know that numbers alone don’t change the world. But they strip away excuses. They leave leaders naked. They make it impossible for anyone to say, “We didn’t know.”

Now we know.

If you can help us keep telling these truths — plainly, relentlessly, and free for the people who need them most — please click here to become a member, and if you’re able, click here to join as a monthly, annual, or founding member. Your support is how we keep going.

Love and appreciate each of you.
Your friend and brother,
Shaun

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