When I ask Reem Al-Buhaisi how many of her family members have been killed in Israel’s assault on Gaza since October 7, 2023, she doesn’t answer with a number. Instead, she recalls the deaths chronologically: her uncle, a cousin, and his daughter were killed on October 12, 2023, in an Israeli airstrike outside the family home. In March 2024, a cousin who volunteered with the Palestinian Red Crescent Society was shot and killed as Israel laid siege to the Al-Amal hospital. That same day, Al-Buhaisi, who lives in Ottawa, found out that another uncle, his wife, two daughters, and seven grandchildren were killed in their home. Another cousin, his wife, and four children were killed in July 2024. And, Al-Buhaisi says, she can go on and on.
When someone recounts the family members they have lost, they aren’t necessarily trying to create a formal record. It’s a basic act of memorialization. Often, it’s to call attention to grief and the horrors of war. Yet it’s these personal accounts that sometimes make all the difference when trying to arrive at an accurate death toll in a conflict zone. And Gaza has provided a horrifying arena for casualty counting to take centre stage.
On October 8, 2024, Al Jazeera posted a video that listed 34,344 casualties identified by the Gazan health ministry in the first year of Israel’s war on the Palestinian territory. It takes fifty-nine minutes to scroll through 649 pages of victims’ names and ages, starting with Noura Walid Abdulsalam Shaheen, zero years old. This month, Palestinian authorities reported that the death toll had surpassed 50,000. The numbers are incomprehensible: Al Jazeera reported that in 2024, on average, 115 people were killed every day, including forty-six children.
In seeking to link every death with a name, Al Jazeera’s reporting follows a critical tradition. The names of the 8,372 victims of the Srebrenica genocide are carved into a memorial wall. Each year, the names of 4,800,000 identified Jewish victims of the Holocaust are read in public ceremonies. While the Nazis didn’t keep a single centralized record of how many people they murdered during the Third Reich, at various concentration camps, they did capture information about who was killed. Still, there are missing names: it’s estimated that over a million Jewish victims have not been identified.
Not all conflicts have been so meticulously documented. In Rwanda, while the United Nations originally estimated that 800,000 were killed in the ethnic violence that targeted the Tutsi population in 1994, 100,000 more bodies have been unearthed just in the past five years. It may take years for the world to understand the full extent of what the International Court of Justice warns could amount to a genocide in Gaza.
Whether amid the constant stream of videos and images or the silence that marks so many atrocities, the world relies on casualty counters—NGO staff and volunteers, government agencies, academics, and UN officials—to count the dead, as free from political interference as possible.
These counters strive to produce data that holds up against scrutiny so that a toll cannot be ignored or downplayed. In the earliest days of Israel’s attacks on Gaza, which followed the Hamas-led massacre that killed 1,269 people in Israel on October 7, 2023, Israeli and Western governments contested the number of Palestinian casualties. On October 25, then US president Joe Biden announced that he had “no confidence” in the figures that Gaza’s health ministry had reported. (Media outlets often emphasize that casualty estimates are coming from the Hamas-run Gazan health ministry, seemingly implying that the numbers should be questioned or can’t be trusted.) This triggered Gazan authorities to release the names of everyone who they said had been killed by Israel since October 7—an unprecedented act in modern warfare.
With this list in hand, the UK-based organization Airwars set out to verify the health authority’s numbers from a specific period of time, checking each name against their own sources. Counters used data collected on social media, death announcements, photos of body bags with names on them, or handwritten lists held by family members up to a camera. They retrieved ID information—the same identification that Israel assigns to Palestinians and uses to monitor their travel—to confirm the names of the victims. By July 2024, Airwars had identified where and how 3,259 Gazans were killed in just the first three weeks of Israeli aggression and cross-referenced their information with data released by the health ministry. Based on that work, Airwars was able to confirm that the overall numbers from Gaza were reliable.
On its website, Airwars groups casualties together by attack: fifteen members of the Abu Sharia family killed by air strike in Gaza City on October 20, 2023; seventeen members of the Abu Shuaib family killed in their home in an air strike that same day; twenty-five members of the al-Astal family killed in their home in Khan Younis on October 22, 2023, in an attack that was initially reported by media as having killed three.
More than a year later, details about the ferocity of Israel’s retaliation are still emerging. According to a December 2024 New York Times investigation, at 1 p.m. on October 7, 2023, the Israeli army received orders to loosen protocols, allowing Israel Defense Forces members to kill people they identified as belonging to Hamas, even if it meant killing up to twenty civilians at the same time.
Airwars was founded in 2014 as a volunteer-run organization; today it includes nineteen staff and dozens of volunteers. It’s affiliated with the University of London and is part of the Casualty Recorders Network (CRN) established by the charitable organization Every Casualty Counts (ECC). Through ECC, which currently includes over sixty members, academics and humanitarian organizations from around the world have created a set of standards for identifying and recording the names of those killed in armed conflicts.
For many casualty-counting groups, documenting civilian deaths is key. Who is and who is not a civilian depends on the circumstance of an attack. Combatants are typically not included, unless they are killed in a non-military setting, like in their homes. That’s not always the case when an official agency counts deaths, as in Gaza’s case, where the health ministry has not made a distinction between combatants and civilians. (Israel’s official death toll of 1,139 people killed on October 7, 2023, includes 373 members of security forces.) According to international humanitarian law, combatants are assumed to be legitimate participants in an armed conflict, whereas civilians should be protected from violence.
In CRN’s handbook, ECC explains that the purpose of independently verifying casualties is to “humanise victims, reduce dispute over numbers killed, help societies understand the true human costs of war, and support truth and reconciliation efforts.” The handbook emphasizes that definitions should be transparent and not favour a side in a conflict. It also calls for key data points to be collected about each death: location, date and time, source, number of other people killed, type of death, and who was involved. Each casualty is given a reliability rating: from “confirmed,” where the group that has caused the death claims responsibility, to “discounted,” meaning Airwars finds the reported information to be inaccurate.
Airwars honed their techniques during the war against ISIS. The group’s work was fundamental in better understanding the civilian impact of the US-led attacks on the Islamist group. Over the length of the ongoing campaign, which has spanned more than a decade, Airwars has tracked 14,886 air strikes in Iraq and 19,904 in Syria. Witnesses, journalists, military officials, and others have alleged that between 19,188 and 29,786 killings took place; Airwars reported that deaths it could confirm or deemed fairly reported so far ranged between 8,221 and 13,300. (Both ranges include varying reliability ratings.) Their data is public: you can look at every account of civilian death and read how Airwars has rated it, including deaths from attacks that happened during flashpoints in the conflict, like the Battle of Mosul. These figures are especially important given how low the US-led coalition’s official civilian figures are: just 1,437 over the decade of fighting.
In 2022, Airwars was part of an advocacy campaign that fought to ensure that casualty counting would be included in an international agreement adopted by more than eighty states—the pointedly named Political Declaration on Strengthening the Protection of Civilians from the Humanitarian Consequences Arising from the Use of Explosive Weapons in Populated Areas. One clause reads, in part: “Improved data on civilian harm would help to inform policies designed to avoid, and in any event minimise, civilian harm; aid efforts to investigate harm to civilians; support efforts to determine or establish accountability, and enhance lessons learned processes in armed forces.” Both Canada and the United States are signatories. Israel is not.
For years, Airwars also lobbied the US military to be more transparent with the information it shares (militaries collect data, but more importantly, they are responsible for civilian casualties). In August 2022, the US introduced the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan, which established a centre within the Department of Defense that would focus on civilian harms mitigation rather than relying on different military commanders who may or may not report civilian casualties consistently. In April 2023, the Department of Defense appointed Michael McNerney, a researcher who has done work on civilian harms mitigation, as director of the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence. Airwars director Emily Tripp calls the action plan a “huge success in the field of civilian protection.”
The action plan lists eleven objectives, including the standardized collection and reporting of civilian harms and mitigating the possibility of civilian injuries in an operation. It also acknowledges that reducing civilian harms has a strategic benefit: “Hard-earned tactical and operational successes may ultimately end in strategic failure if care is not taken to protect the civilian environment as much as the situation allows.” In other words, civilian casualties could be seen as cancelling out any triumphs, calling into question the very purpose of military action.
Airwars’ figures also allow for citizens to look at the actions taken by their own countries. In January 2015, during the war on ISIS, a Canadian fighter jet was involved in an aerial campaign that may have killed up to twenty-seven civilians. It took more than seven months for the Canadian government to admit that there may have been casualties. The Pentagon released information on the strike thanks to the efforts of Airwars and the CBC’s The Fifth Estate, which published an article on the civilian killings that September. Even now, Airwars’ resulting report remains officially “contested” based on the fact that the US disagrees with its assessment.
A lack of Canadian professionals in conflict zones (journalists or government workers) limits what information actually reaches Canada. It still surprises Lauren Ravon, the executive director of Oxfam Canada, that her organization has “significantly more access to information” than parliamentarians seem to have, despite the large Canadian diplomatic machinery. (Oxfam doesn’t count casualties, but it has used data from ECC organizations to assess how deadly conflicts are. In September 2024, for example, Oxfam released a report that found that the deaths of women and children in Gaza in just under one year exceeded those in any other conflict in the past two decades.)
Upon returning from a trip to Israel and the West Bank in the spring of 2024, Ravon heard from Canadian officials who weren’t aware that Israel had enforced a military border between north and south Gaza, making it extremely difficult to move humanitarian aid to the north. “Over the years, I’ve realized it’s actually good to be deliberate about providing more information,” she says, “because what you assume they have, it’s not always the case.”
Global Affairs Canada (GAC) doesn’t have a standard mechanism to track casualties in conflict zones, nor to determine the quality of information received. A spokesperson said via email, “GAC does not systematically count or maintain records of deaths in armed conflict zones,” and declined a request for an interview. In response to questions about Gaza, its communications office confirmed that it “accepts the de facto Health Ministry in Gaza casualty numbers as the official authority for the death toll, in the absence of an independent international mechanism on the ground.”
The Department of National Defence does have a system to track casualties, but this tracking is done in the context of offering intelligence, “to support Canada’s national security objectives.” The information compiled by the Canadian Forces Intelligence Command comes from classified and public reporting streams, though a spokesperson declined to comment further on which public reporting streams they rely on. They add, “The exact methodology would depend conflict-to-conflict based on the sources available.”
Tripp says that compared to their research on other conflicts, Airwars’ work on Gaza is the most detailed that it has ever done, in part thanks to the transparency from Gaza’s health ministry. But what complicates the counting is that air strikes have killed record keepers: health care workers, who ultimately report to ministry officials when someone has died within their facilities, and journalists, of whom at least 170 have been killed. In November, the Committee to Protect Journalists deplored the fact that there were “almost no professional” journalists left in the north of Gaza.
According to Mike Spagat, economics professor at Royal Holloway, University of London, and chair of the ECC board, the figures up until October 26, 2023, were much more reliable than the numbers that have come since. While the health ministry could match ID numbers with reports of casualties in the early days of the attacks, that reliability dropped significantly as civil infrastructure—including hospitals—was destroyed.
The numbers also don’t paint the full picture. With the health system in total collapse, the lack of medical care, in addition to starvation, disease, and displacement, may ultimately kill more people in Gaza than direct military actions have. And casualty recorders cannot count indirect deaths using standards developed to identify combat-related deaths.
In one discussion paper published by The Lancet in July 2024, researchers Rasha Khatib, Martin McKee, and Salim Yusuf argue that the number of deaths in Gaza could amount to at least 186,000. The mathematical model they used to arrive at this projection is based on data from other recent conflicts, where, the authors write, “such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths.” This past January, The Lancet published another paper, which showed that deaths in the first nine months of the war could have been undercounted by 41 percent.
While such models can be critical to understanding the long-term toll of violent conflicts, they have their limits: the estimates they produce can be dismissed as not being based on empirical evidence. News outlets typically publish death tolls based on casualty counts rather than those projected from statistical modelling—likely to avoid being charged with bias. It might be safer to stick with numbers that can be scrutinized and rechecked.
But casualty counting is about more than counting the dead. It offers a measure of the violence of a conflict and the needlessness of that violence. Groups like Airwars aim to build political consensus on what should be self-evident: the need to stop wars from killing innocent civilians.
Al-Buhaisi worries that an overemphasis on the numbers, especially in Canadian media, has actually dehumanized Palestinians, as the daily or weekly count of deaths and injuries overshadows the tragedy wrapped up in every single death. “When we start getting into numbers is when we start trying to justify what life is worth. And I think that’s unbelievably evil and sinister,” she says.
At the most basic level, Al-Buhaisi reminds me of what matters most: “Even just one child dead, one pregnant woman dead, is enough to say what’s happening is wrong and we need to stop.”
