It’s impossible to know with certainty just how many Palestinians have died since Hamas terrorists killed about 1,200 Israelis on October 7. The official number as of this week totaled 17,700, but keeping track of the living and the dead is complicated amid the fog of war. The Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry doesn’t differentiate between militants and civilians—or whether the dead were killed by Israeli or Hamas forces—but outside estimates suggest that in past conflicts, about two-thirds of casualties were noncombatants.
John Aziz is a British Palestinian writer and musician.
