Nearly 100,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, representing about 4% of the territory’s population, the Israeli daily Haaretz said on Friday.

The death toll contradicts the number of fatalities given by Gaza’s Health Ministry, which stood at over 56,300 since October 2023.

Haaretz said in addition to the high Palestinian deaths from Israeli attacks, many people also died from the indirect effects of the war, such as hunger, cold, and diseases amid a collapse of the health system in Gaza.

The daily said while Israeli spokespersons, journalists and influencers reject with knee-jerk disgust the death toll announced by Gaza’s Health Ministry as exaggerated, more and more international experts “are stating that not only is this list, with all the horror it embodies, reliable – but that it may even be very conservative in relation to reality.”

It cited a study conducted by Professor Michael Spagat, an economist at Holloway College at the University of London, a world-class expert on mortality in violent conflicts, about deaths in Gaza.

The study surveyed 2,000 households in the Palestinian enclave, comprising almost 10,000 people.

“They concluded that, as of January 2025, some 75,200 people died a violent death in Gaza during the war, the vast majority caused by Israeli munitions,” it said.

According to the survey's data, 56% of those killed have been either children up to the age of 18 or women.

“That's an exceptional figure when compared with almost every other conflict since World War II,” Haaretz said.

Spagat said the survey’s data positions the Gaza war “as one of the bloodiest conflicts of the 21st century.”