Since 1948

Seventy-eight years of the death toll, and the holes in it

Everything else on this dashboard runs on a daily or monthly series that begins in October 2023. This block carries the periods before it. No continuous Palestinian death register has ever existed, so the record is assembled from separate bodies of work — a contemporaneous Palestinian enumeration of 1948, B'Tselem's case-by-case database from 1987, OCHA's monitoring from 2005, the Gaza Ministry of Health register from 2023 — each with its own definitions, geography and start date.

Palestinians killed, by documented period

Log scale. Amber: periods documented by a named organisation. Grey: an overlapping or partial series. Red: the current war. Violet, hatched: no organisation published a figure, so one is constructed here from adjacent counts — the arithmetic is set out in the table, and the estimate is never added to the documented running total.

See the table below

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The documented running total, against the only cumulative figure that exists

Bars: deaths added in each period that can be counted without double counting. Amber line: the running total. Blue dashed line: the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics figure for the whole period since 1948.

PCBS, June 2024

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Every figure below carries the organisation that produced it and the method it used. Where no organisation published a figure, the row carries a constructed estimate instead: it is labelled as an estimate, shown with its low and high bounds, set out with the components it was built from, and excluded from the documented running total. The blocks are not additive with one another unless marked as counted, because several of the series overlap in time and none of them count the same population.

Treat every number here as a floor. Undercounting is structural: bodies never recovered, deaths in detention never recorded, indirect deaths from siege and the destruction of the health system, and twenty years of occupation for which no organisation was systematically counting at all.

Period	Span	Palestinians killed	of whom children	Source and method
The Nakba and the 1948 war Over 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled; 530 villages were destroyed and 11 towns and cities depopulated. The death toll is the least well established part of the 1948 record, because the population that would have counted it was the population being displaced.	1947–1949	13,000 estimates 5,700–15,000	—	Aref al-Aref, al-Nakba (13,000); PCBS (15,000); Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (5,700–5,800); Stanley Sandler (6,373, of whom 2,373 civilians) Contemporaneous Palestinian enumeration by Aref al-Aref, later revised by historians working from Israeli military archives. No central register existed on either side.
Military government over Palestinian citizens of Israel The hard figure of 435 is the sum of three documented massacres: Kafr Qasim, 29 October 1956, 49 Palestinian citizens of Israel shot at a curfew line, 23 of them children; Khan Yunis, November 1956, 275 killed during the Israeli occupation of Gaza in the Suez war; Rafah, November 1956, 111 killed. The wider estimate adds the border confrontations of 1949–1956, in which 2,700 to 5,000 Palestinians were killed.	1949–1966	435 documented incidents only ~3,850 estimated range 2,700–5,000; beyond the documented figure, not added to the running total	23	Kafr Qasim: Israeli military court record, 1957. Khan Yunis and Rafah: UNRWA Director's report to the UN General Assembly, 1957. Border confrontations: standard compilation of Arab–Israeli casualties, 1949–1956 Individually documented incidents, plus a published range for the border confrontations of 1949–1956. There was no body counting deaths across the period as a whole. Border confrontations, 1949–1956: 2,700–5,000 Palestinians killed, against roughly 500 Israelis over the same years. The midpoint of that range is used. The three documented massacres below sit inside it.
The Six-Day War and the Naksa The displacement is documented: roughly 300,000 Palestinians driven from the West Bank and Gaza, of whom over 100,000 were already refugees from 1948, with estimates ranging from 280,000 to 325,000, plus 100,000 Syrians from the Golan. The villages of Imwas, Yalo and Bayt Nuba were destroyed outright. The dead were never counted.	1967	~2,000 estimated range 1,000–3,000; no published figure, not added to the running total	—	Displacement: report of the UN Secretary-General, 1967. Military casualties: standard campaign histories. Civilian killings: BADIL; Segev, 1967; Masalha No consolidated Palestinian civilian death toll for the 1967 war has been produced by any of the organisations that count. The figure shown is this dashboard's own estimate, built from its parts and labelled as such. Constructed, not published. Components: roughly 700 Jordanian soldiers killed in the West Bank campaign of 6–7 June, in an army with heavy Palestinian enlistment; documented civilian killings at Rafah, Khan Yunis and Qalqilya; the destruction of Imwas, Yalo and Bayt Nuba; and refugees shot while attempting to return across the Jordan. The range is wide because the civilian component has no count at all.
The occupation before the First Intifada The longest hole in the record, and not an accident of archiving: it covers the two decades in which the settlement enterprise was built. It also contains events Israel's own institutions have adjudicated — the Kahan Commission found Defence Minister Ariel Sharon personally responsible for Sabra and Shatila, and he became Prime Minister eighteen years later. The estimate excludes the wider 1982 invasion of Lebanon, in which roughly 17,500 people were killed, most of them Lebanese and Palestinian civilians.	1967–1987	~3,300 estimated range 1,960–4,660; no published figure, not added to the running total	—	MERIP, Israel and the Palestinians 1948–1988; IMEU; palquest; Kahan Commission of Inquiry, 1983; Bayan Nuwayhed al-Hout, Sabra and Shatila: September 1982 B'Tselem was founded in 1989. OCHA's oPt casualty monitoring begins in 2005. For these twenty years no organisation was systematically recording Palestinian deaths under occupation, so the figure shown is this dashboard's own estimate, assembled from separately documented events and labelled as such. Constructed from the documented components. Sharon's pacification of Gaza, 1970–71: over 1,000 killed (IMEU), against palquest's 742 killed or captured. West Bank, 1968–1983: 92 killed, on Israel's own government figures (MERIP, 1988). Land Day, 30 March 1976: roughly 48. Sabra and Shatila, September 1982: 800 on the Kahan Commission's own finding, up to 3,500 on Bayan Nuwayhed al-Hout's research — the low and high bounds here. April 1986 – May 1987: 22.
The First Intifada 1,087 killed by the Israeli army, 107 killed by Israeli civilians in the occupied territories (94 in the West Bank, 13 in Gaza), and 28 killed inside Israel. 240 were minors. In the first thirteen months alone, 332 Palestinians were killed against 12 Israelis. The report records the same period as over 1,000 killed including 237 children, and Defence Minister Yitzhak Rabin's explicit order to break the limbs of stone-throwing children; Rabin received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994.	Dec 1987 – Sep 1993	1,222	240	B'Tselem, fatality database for 9 December 1987 – 13 September 1993 Case-by-case investigation: circumstances of each death examined, eyewitness accounts taken, official documents and media reports cross-checked.
The Oslo years The years in which the settler population of the West Bank roughly doubled while the peace process was under way. Over the same period nearly 300 Israelis were killed in attacks. The Ibrahimi Mosque massacre of 25 February 1994, in which the Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein shot 29 Palestinians dead at prayer in Hebron, falls inside it.	1993–2000	~460 estimated range 400–520; no published figure, not added to the running total	—	Derived from B'Tselem cumulative figures B'Tselem's main searchable database begins with the Second Intifada in September 2000; OCHA's begins in 2005. The interval between the two intifadas sits in a separate legacy table, so the figure here is derived by subtraction and labelled as an estimate. Derived, not published. B'Tselem's cumulative count of Palestinians killed by the Israeli army or by settlers since 1993 is 6,829; its count for the Second Intifada decade from 29 September 2000 is 6,371. The difference of 458 is the Oslo interval. The derivation assumes the two counts share an end date; B'Tselem maintains its own Oslo-period table, whose annual figures were not obtainable for this build.
The Second Intifada and the decade after it 6,371 Palestinians killed by Israeli security forces. 1,317 were minors. At least 2,996 were not participating in hostilities when they were killed, against 2,193 who were, with 694 unclassified — so of the cases where status could be established, the majority were not fighting. 248 were Gaza police killed in the opening minutes of Cast Lead and 240 were targets of assassination. B'Tselem's running markers within the decade: 3,174 by the end of 2004 (617 minors), 4,005 by the end of 2006 (811 minors). The report separately records the Second Intifada proper, 2000–2005, as roughly 4,000 Palestinians killed including about 950 children (Defence for Children International).	29 Sep 2000 – 26 Sep 2010	6,371	1,317	B'Tselem, ten-year fatality report Case-by-case investigation of every death, with each victim classified by whether they were participating in hostilities at the time.
OCHA's monitoring period Excluded from the running total because 2008, 2009 and 2010 are already inside B'Tselem's decade above — this is an independent series over an overlapping period, not an additional one. 115,000 Palestinians were injured over the same thirteen years. The deadliest year was 2014, at 2,329 killed; the worst years for injuries were 2018 (31,259), 2021 (19,183) and 2014 (17,533).	2008–2020	5,600 overlapping series, not added	—	UN OCHA, occupied Palestinian territory database UN incident-level monitoring across Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Gaza and the West Bank since 7 October 2023 73,670 killed in Gaza and 1,114 in the West Bank. Peer-reviewed work puts the real figure far higher: The Lancet's capture–recapture study found a 41% undercount of traumatic-injury deaths to 30 June 2024, and the Gaza Mortality Survey found 35% by an independent household method. This single period is larger than every other documented period on this list combined, by a factor of about three and a half.	Oct 2023 – present	74,784	20,179	Gaza Ministry of Health and OCHA, compiled by Tech For Palestine Named individual identification records for the majority, aggregate hospital and morgue reporting for the remainder. Excludes the dead still under rubble by definition: the register counts bodies received.

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Three of the nine periods have no published figure at all, and they span 1967–1987 and 1993–2000 — twenty-seven years. The absence is itself a finding: the record is thinnest exactly where there was no occupying-power obligation to publish, no Palestinian state to count, and no international monitoring mission in place. Rather than leave the three rows empty, each carries a constructed estimate with its arithmetic shown in full, marked as an estimate wherever it appears and never added to the documented running total.

136,000 — Palestinians killed since 1948

Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (Dr Ola Awad), World Refugee Day report, June 2024

The only cumulative figure published by the Palestinian statistical authority. It was issued in June 2024, when the Gaza toll stood near 37,000, so it implies roughly 99,000 deaths across 1948–2023 — far more than the individually documented periods below sum to. PCBS has not published the period-by-period basis for it, so it cannot be reconciled line by line with the blocks in this table. It is shown as an anchor, not as a total.

The accountability gap

What happens to a complaint

What happens to a complaint about a soldier killing or injuring a Palestinian, from the Israeli organisation that follows every one of them through the Israeli military justice system. Yesh Din has been tracking the funnel since 2003.

Complaints, investigations and indictments, 2016–2024

Every stage as a share of the complaints that started it.

Yesh Din

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The same funnel, four ways

Period	Complaints	Investigated	Indicted
2016–2024 22.7% of complaints produced a criminal investigation. 0.9% produced an indictment.	2,427	552 22.7%	23 0.9%
2017–2021 409 of the 1,260 cases concerned a killing. 21.4% were investigated. Eleven indictments were filed in total, three of them for a killing — 0.87% of cases.	1,260	248 19.7%	11 0.9%
2018–2022 30% investigated, the highest investigation rate in the series, and still a 1.5% prosecution rate. The thirteen indictments covered 29 soldiers, and exactly one of them was for a killing.	862	258 29.9%	13 1.5%

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0.4%

Chance of prosecution for killing a Palestinian

One prosecution in 219 recorded fatalities

Yesh Din

77.3%

Complaints that never reach an investigation

2016–2024: 1,875 of 2,427 closed without a criminal investigation being opened

Yesh Din

23

Indictments in nine years

against 2,427 complaints of soldiers killing or injuring Palestinians

Yesh Din

The funnel is not a backlog. Most complaints are closed without a criminal investigation ever being opened, so the case never enters the system that could convict anyone.
This matters legally, not just morally. Complementarity under the Rome Statute means the International Criminal Court may act only where the state is unwilling or unable genuinely to investigate. A 0.9% indictment rate over nine years is the evidentiary basis for that finding, produced by an Israeli organisation from Israeli military records.
Yesh Din's figures cover soldiers only. Israeli civilians who attack Palestinians in the West Bank are handled by the Israel Police, whose own closure rates over the same period are of the same order.

Displacement and demolition

The continuous mechanism

Killing is the most visible part of the record and the smallest part of it by number. Dispossession is the continuous mechanism, and it runs through every period above without a break.

People displaced and structures demolished, 1948–2026

Log scale. Blue: people displaced. Amber: homes and structures demolished.

UN; UNRWA; ICAHD; Land Research Center

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750k+

Expelled or fled, 1948

Over half the Arab population of Palestine. 530 villages destroyed, 11 towns and cities depopulated.

UN; report §2.3 · 1947–1949

300k

Displaced, 1967

Estimates range from 280,000 to 325,000. Over 100,000 of them were being displaced for the second time, having already been made refugees in 1948.

UN Secretary-General, 1967 · 1967

160k

Internally displaced under occupation

Within the West Bank and Gaza, by demolition, revocation and closure rather than by war.

BADIL; ICAHD · 1967–2023

ICAHD's figure for the occupied territory is published in three versions — 26,000, 48,038 and 55,000 — which differ by date and by what counts as a structure, not by disagreement about the events. The highest is its February 2019 compilation and is the one shown here.
ICAHD's own methodological warning applies to every figure in this block: neither Israel nor OCHA keeps a count of home demolitions separately from the demolition of structures, so barns, animal pens, cisterns and fencing are inside the same totals. ICAHD also states that it is still investigating demolitions carried out between 1967 and 1982, before the Civil Administration began keeping records.
Demolition is administrative, not military. The stated ground in the large majority of cases is building without an Israeli permit, in a permit system that almost never issues one to a Palestinian while approving thousands of settlement housing units over the same period.

Mass detention

Since 1967, without charge

The occupation's other continuous instrument. Israel has held Palestinians under military order in the occupied territory since 1967, and administrative detention — indefinite imprisonment on secret evidence, without charge or trial — has been available to it throughout.

Palestinians held in administrative detention, at each documented snapshot

Detention without charge, without trial, and on evidence the detainee may not see. The orders are renewable without limit.

Addameer

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The three laws

Article 285, Military Order 1651
West Bank
Six-month detention orders, renewable without limit, on evidence neither the detainee nor their lawyer may see.

Internment of Unlawful Combatants Law
Gaza residents, since 2005
Indefinite detention outside the military order framework.

Emergency Powers (Detentions) Law
Israeli citizens
The same power inside Israel. Over the entire history of its use, nine Israeli settlers have been held under administrative detention.

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800k+

Palestinians detained under Israeli military orders since 1967

roughly 20% of the population of the occupied territory, and up to 40% of all Palestinian males

Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association

11k+

Political prisoners, October 2025

the highest total since the Second Intifada began in 2000, excluding army-run military camps

Addameer

9

Israeli settlers ever held in administrative detention

over the entire history of the power, against more than 800,000 Palestinian detentions

Addameer

Administrative detention is not a charge that has yet to be brought. It is a procedure that replaces charge: the detainee is not told the evidence, cannot answer it, and the order is renewable indefinitely.
Children are inside these figures. Israel is the only state in the world that systematically prosecutes children in military courts, at roughly 500 to 700 cases a year before the war and 370 child prisoners held as of the October 2025 snapshot.
98 Palestinians have died in Israeli custody since October 2023, documented by Physicians for Human Rights–Israel.