By Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins

From The Costs of War Project | Original Article

This report covers the human costs of the Hamas strike and Israel’s military operations since October 7, 2023 in Gaza and the West Bank. Costs of War is a research project focused on U.S. military spending, as well as direct and indirect deaths associated with U.S. wars and militarism. In just one year, as a companion report shows, the U.S. has spent at least $22.76 billion on military aid to Israel and related U.S. operations in the region.2 The current report gathers previously published data to provide an overview of the direct and indirect deaths that have resulted, and will continue to result, from U.S.-supported Israeli military operations.

This report covers just one front in the expanding regional war with a summary of events and figures from the past year. While our focus is on the largest impacts, there is additional harm in other areas of the war zone – in Israel, Lebanon, Yemen, and East Jerusalem – that this report does not cover. Further, current violence in Lebanon and elsewhere is not included, nor are some events that occurred in late September/early October 2024. The report includes United Nations estimates of Israeli and Palestinian direct deaths from violence in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank since October 7.

In addition to killing people directly through traumatic injuries, wars cause “indirectdeaths” by destroying, damaging, or causing deterioration of economic, social,psychological and health conditions.3 Most expansively, this report describes the causalpathways that can be expected to lead to far larger numbers of indirect deaths.4 Thesedeaths result from diseases and other population-level health effects that stem from war’sdestruction of public infrastructure and livelihood sources, reduced access to water andsanitation, environmental damage, and other such factors.5

This report builds on a foundation of previous Costs of War research for itsframework and methodology in covering the most significant chains of impact, or causalpathways, to indirect war deaths in Gaza and the West Bank.6 Unlike in combat, thesedeaths do not necessarily occur immediately or in the close aftermath of the battles whichmany observers focus on. While it will take years to assess the full extent of thesepopulation-level health effects, they will inevitably lead to far higher numbers of deathsthan direct violence.

Read the full report here.

1Associate Professor of Anthropology, Bard College ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ); Edited by Stephanie Savell, Director of Costs of War and Senior Fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ). Many thanks to Mimi Healy for copyediting and to Neta C.
Crawford, Catherine Lutz and Darcey Rakestraw for editorial comments.
2 See “United States Spending on Israel’s Military Operations and Related U.S. Operations in the Region, October 7, 2023-September 30, 2024.”
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/2024/USspendingIsrael

3 In other words, this war has caused “excess deaths”—that is, deaths that would not have occurred in a counterfactual scenario of no Israeli military operations—including deaths beyond those that occur immediately as a result of military violence. Jamaluddine, Z.; Chen, Z.; Abukmail, H.; Aly, S.; Elnakib, S.;
Barnsley, G.; et al. (2024). Crisis in Gaza: Scenario-based health impact projections. Report One: 7 February to 6 August 2024. London, Baltimore: London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Johns Hopkins University. https://aoav.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/gaza_projections_report.pdf, P. 12.
4 “Causal pathways” is the epidemiological term for this long sequence of war’s consequences, a pattern of damages that can lead to death, disabilities and other long-lasting physical and mental health conditions. Wise, P. H. (2017, January 1). The Epidemiologic Challenge to the Conduct of Just War: Confronting Indirect Civilian Casualties of War. Daedalus, 146(1):139-154, p. 143.
5 A complex issue in scholarly discussions of “indirect deaths” in war is that of intentionality. When warring parties intentionally attack food distribution, for instance, this raises the question of whether the ensuing deaths should actually be considered direct, rather than indirect, results of combat. According to the Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols, international treaties that are ratified by many countries and form the basis of international humanitarian law, wars’ expected damage to civilians should never be intentional, though the protocols acknowledge that such damage may occur as a side effect. In the case of the Israeli government’s operations in Gaza, the question of intentionality in regards to civilian deaths is being, and will continue to be, debated. For the purposes of this report, however, the category of “indirect deaths” includes all non-violent war deaths, whether intentional or not.
6 Savell, S. (2023, May 15). How Death Outlives War: The Reverberating Impact of the Post-9/11 Wars on Human Health. Costs of War, Watson Institute, Brown University. https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/2023/IndirectDeaths