A closer look at those killed in the conflict so far.
The Reuters site should be viewed to appreciate the graphics
Reuters — Sudev Kiyada, Simon Scarr and Nidal al-Mughrabi — April 3, 2025
This is Mohammed Al-Agha. He's 13 years old.
An image of Mohammed, in black and white, taken from a video.
His immediate family we're all killed during the war in Gaza.
Figures of his family appear behind him as transparent bodies. The names of each family member are shown including his mother, father, one brothers and two sisters.
They are among more than 50,523 people that Palestinian authorities say have been killed in Israel's military campaign since October 7, 2023.
Mohammed now disappears, his family's transparent figures become solid gray.
Israel says those figures, which do not distinguish between combatants and civilians, are untrustworthy but has not published its own estimate of the total death toll in Gaza. Senior Israeli figures have said they believe 20,000 Hamas fighters have been killed.
Key organizations mentioned: Reuters, Gaza Health Ministry, Hamas, IDF (Israel Defense Forces), World Health Organization (WHO), BTselem
Behind the family, the page is filled with more and more people to represent just some of the more than 51,000 who have died over the past year.
The lives lost in Gaza
A closer look at those killed in the conflict so far.
Last updated April 3, 2025 11:30 BST
Mohammed now lives with his uncle in Gaza after his home was hit by an Israeli strike on November 18, 2023. The names of his mother, father, brother and two sisters are now on Gaza Health Ministry's list of the dead.
A ceasefire paused the fighting on January 19, but the death toll kept rising because more bodies we're unearthed from the rubble and added to the list as people returned to devastated neighbourhoods.
After a first phase of the ceasefire expired without agreement on steps towards a lasting end to the conflict, Israel resumed intensive air strikes on March 18 and ground operations on March 19.
The death toll from the war already dwarfs the numbers killed in previous bouts of fighting between Israelis and Palestinians in Gaza.
Palestinians accuse Israel of indiscriminate bombardment of the Strip, which is home to more than two million people. Israel's military says it tries to avoid harming civilians but that fighters loyal to Palestinian Islamist group Hamas hid among the general population.
Israel has also suffered badly. It says Hamas and allied Palestinian militant groups killed around 1,200 people in the Oct. 7 attack and abducted another 251, dragging them back to Gaza. It has also lost more than 400 troops in the fighting.
Reuters examined the data from the Gaza Health Ministry to look more closely at those who have died.
It found that more than one-fifth of those killed in the territory we're children under the age of 12. More than 1,200 families were completely wiped out, the data showed, including one entire family of 14 people. Roughly half of those killed - 25,211 - we're Palestinian males aged 15-65 killed, according to the health ministry figures slightly greater than the Israeli estimates of the number of Hamas fighters eliminated.
A history of violence
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is driven by competing claims for land. Israel-which has fought several wars with neighboring countries since its creation in 1948- defends its right to secure its own borders. Palestinians want to create their own state in Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Israel captured both territories in 1967 in the Six Day War. Gaza was a focal point for Palestinian uprisings against Israeli rule in 1988 and again in 2000.
Israeli forces unilaterally pulled out in 2005 and Hamas
- an Islamist group that seeks the destruction of Israel - seized control of it in 2007, expelling its rival Fatah.
But the violence did not stop. In the following years, Hamas attacked Israel with rockets and attempted infiltrations. Israel launched several major military operations against the group.
Reuters visualised the death toll for both Palestinians and Israelis in Gaza since the Israeli pull-out in September 2005. The data comes from the Israeli human rights organisation BTselem.
BTselem has built a database that it says has tracked every recorded death directly from the conflict over decades. The organisation, whose donors include U.N. bodies and Western governments, cross-checks press reports with eyewitness accounts and official sources. It has not yet published any figures on the current conflict. Israel's military and Hamas did not respond when asked to comment on BTselems data.
Casualties began mounting soon after Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip. Deaths we're in the double digits within the first few months.
Fatalities we're due to sporadic incidents between Israel and Hamas, as we'll as major Israeli military operations against the group in Gaza.
The biggest operations we're Summer Rains in 2006, Cast Lead in 2012 and Protective Edge in 2014.
This conflict has been far deadlier.
The number of Palestinians killed far outweighs Israelis.
- Data for deaths from 2005-2023 is from Israeli rights group BTselem. Data for Palestinians killed since Oct. 7, 2023 is from the Gaza Health Ministry. Data for Israelis killed on or since Oct. 7 2023 is from the Israeli government and includes an unknown number of foreign nationals killed in the Hamas attack.
In analysing Palestinian deaths from the latest conflict, Reuters has used only detailed data from the Gaza Health Ministry's last release of full information, covering deaths up to March 22, 2025.
This data which includes names, ages, ID numbers and gender covers 50,021 of those killed. Detailed information for the remainder of those killed is not available.
Disputes over numbers
Counting the dead in war zones is difficult and the numbers are often disputed.
The Israeli military says the health ministry in Gaza is controlled by Hamas and subject to its agenda: In consequence, as has been proved and demonstrated repeatedly, the data of the ministry is replete with inconsistencies and false determinations. For instance, the Ministry makes no attempt to differentiate between civilian casualties and terrorists, and has been known to record deaths unrelated to the conflict, such as natural deaths, the Israeli military said.
However, the ministry's figures are seen as reliable by U.N. agencies, such as the World Health Organization, many academics and international NGOs. Christian Lindmeier, a WHO spokesperson, said we do have confidence in the numbers.
Israel's military has accepted in briefings that the overall casualty numbers are broadly reliable, but it says many of those killed were fighters.
The Gaza Health Ministry has rejected Israeli criticism of its numbers, saying it has worked hard to ensure they are accurate and that it has been transparent about its methodology and data. It says it has only included direct deaths from the conflict, not those who died from causes such as disease or lack of shelter.
The genders and ages of the identified Palestinian casualties from October 7, 2023 to March 22, 2025.
Based on the detailed Health Ministry data covering 50,021 of the dead
Just over two-thirds are adults aged 18 or older, while nearly a third are children under 18. That reflects the young average age of the population: the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics reported in 2022 that 40% of people in Gaza we're under the age of 15.
Among children, slightly fewer females have been reported killed than males. Among adults, the group most fighters are drawn from, significantly more men have been reported killed than women.
Breaking this further into age groups, children up to the age of 12 account for over 10,731 dead, or just over 21%. More than 2,562 were 2 or younger.
The deaths among children we're reflected in Mohammeds family. All his siblings fall within this age group. They we're 11, 10 and 8 years old.
Another family to suffer in this way was that of Palestinian father Abdelsalam al-Banna. He lost his two children aged 8 and 5 when their apartment building collapsed during an Israeli airstrike on Dec. 15, 2023. He also lost his wife, sister-in-law and father-in-law.
Salsabiel Mohammad Abdel-Latif Al-Aklouk Wife, 32 years old
Joury Kamal Mohammad Al-Banna Daughter, 9 years old
Kamal Mohammad Kamal Al-Banna Son, 6 years old
Add a description of the graphic for screen readers. This is invisible on the page.
Banna has little recollection of the week he spent buried in the collapsed ruins of the building. He said he was unconscious for much of the time and drank urine to survive.
The place was as dark as a grave. I didn't realise what happened. It felt like a dream, he said. After seven days his mother-in-law and another sister-in-law, who had all been in a corridor near concrete pillars that created a pocket of space, finally found a way out of the rubble after feeling air.
More than a year later, the bodies of his wife and children remain buried beneath the rubble. Banna registered their deaths at a local hospital, providing witness statements from him and his in-laws that the family had been present in the building when it collapsed but had not emerged.
Nothing is more painful than this. I can't put them to rest, he said.
Banna and Mohammeds uncle Muataz al-Agha said that neither building was known to shelter active Hamas members or fighters. Reuters could not independently confirm this.
Israel said it needed precise coordinates of the air strikes that killed the Agha and Banna families to comment on them. Reuters was unable to provide those details and buildings in that area we're not numbered as street addresses.
Abdelsalam Al-Banna escaped from this crevice
Biggest massacre of Jews
When Hamas militants stormed into Israel from Gaza on October 7, 2023, they killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and seized 251 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
Those killed in the Hamas attack included 329 soldiers and 58 police, Israel says.
At least 84 hostages are either confirmed or presumed to have died according to statements by Israel authorities.
It says 409 of its military have also been killed in the war.
Israel has called October 7 the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
Among the people killed by Hamas on October 7 we're three entire Israeli nuclear families according to Israel's Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes by Hamas. One of these was the Siman Tov family: parents Yonatan and Tamar, their six-year-old twins Shahar and Arbel, and four-year-old son Omer.
Palestinian families erased
By Oct. 7 2024, one year into the war, 1,238 Palestinian families that have been wiped out, with no survivors, according to ministry figures. The data defines families as married couples and their children. 70% of these families we're made up of between 2 to 4 people.
The ministry did not provide a more recent tally of the number of families killed.
407 families of two
26 families of three
192 families of four
Add a description of the graphic for screen readers. This is invisible on the page.
Families of 5 to 9 people made up 30% of those erased.
171 families of five
121 families of six
50 families of seven
17 families of eight
10 families of nine
Add a description of the graphic for screen readers. This is invisible on the page.
Among the larger families, there we're three families of 11 people who we're killed. The biggest family to be eliminated was the Haj family, whose 14 members we're killed in the current conflict, according to the data provided by the Palestinian ministry of health.
3 families of eleven
and
1 family of fourteen
Add a description of the graphic for screen readers. This is invisible on the page.
After Israel bombed Suhail al-Majdalawis apartment building two months into the war, rescue workers helped unearth the bodies of 11 of his relatives. But they could not find six more, including three small children. He is waiting for authorities to bring heavy equipment to dig out their bodies.
I've lost all my family and I am very tired and don't know what to do, he said.
Palestinian health authorities say there could be 10,000 dead still lying, uncounted, under the rubble. That figure is not included in this graphic.
Sources
Historic data — The data visualized in the opening timeline animation from Sept. 2005 to Oct. 7, 2023 is sourced from B'Tselem's fatalities database. The database provides statistics on all those killed in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Fatalities from the West Bank were not visualised, leaving only Palestinian and Israeli citizens killed during the conflict in both Gaza and Israel since Sept. 2005. This includes military and civilians. Palestinian citizens of Israel are categorized as Israeli.
Note
*Children are classified as anyone under the age of 18. Data on Israeli deaths during the initial attacks on Oct. 7 may include an unknown number of foreign nationals.
Additional reporting by
Han Huang
Edited by
William Maclean,Angus McDowall and Rebecca Pazos