As Skwawkbox has previously reported, the death toll in Gaza from Israel’s genocidal war on civilians has far exceeded media reports for the best part of two years – around 450,000 by the summer, almost all of them civilians, according to the Israeli military’s own data.

But the latest analysis published in medical journal The Lancet puts the estimated death toll far higher – and the proportion of children among the victims of Israel’s terrorism even higher than the fifty percent previously estimated.

Israel’s genocidal campaign sees Gaza death toll increased

Amid Israel’s wholesale destruction of Gaza, as many as 120,000 bodies remain unrecovered and therefore not included in official death figures, but the impact of starvation and disease after months of Israel’s blockade of food and even basic medicines has now overtaken the toll of those murdered violently by the occupation.

A study by the Lancet based on the slaughter of the first nine months of the Israeli-imposed Gaza massacre found that the total number of violent deaths by April 2025, almost five months ago, was 136,000. The Lancet also estimated at least four ‘indirect’ deaths from starvation, disease and other causes linked to the genocide but not directly caused by violence, for every violent death. Even using that “conservative” figure, the 136,000 violent deaths by April mean 544,000 Palestinian deaths from the imposed deprivation.

This means a total Gaza death toll from Israel’s genocide so far would be a staggering 680,000 deaths – by 25 April this year – and much higher now, after five more months of mass murder and starvation.

And as lawyer Ali Jamal Awad noted, the study also puts the number of babies and children murdered at a far higher proportion of the total than the fifty percent estimated previously:

On September 3, 2025, Dr. Gideon Polya and Professor Richard Hil calculated the total death toll for Gaza since October 7.

My fingers are shaking as I’m writing this.

Based on all the data collected, the death toll in Gaza is at least 680,000.

But even worse, 380,000 are infants under five years of age, 99,000 children five or older, 63,000 women and 138,000 men.

Israel launched its genocide in Gaza on a claim that Palestinian fighters had beheaded babies and baked them in ovens on 7 October 2023. None of that was true. But the terror state has committed a slaughter of infants and children on a scale that Skwawkbox wishes were unimaginable – and a scale higher by a factor of more than ten than the ‘63,000’ that the BBC and other UK media persist in using, a horrific enough number but one that doesn’t even come close to reality.

Featured image via the Canary

By Skwawkbox

This post was originally published on Canary.