Gaza Death Toll: Numbers That Speak for Themselves?

Since October 7, 2023, the counting of casualties has become a central feature in political, humanitarian, and media discussions regarding the conflict between Israeli forces and Hamas in Gaza. Historically, casualty reports have been the responsibility of national authorities to assess the costs of war. However, the prominence of these figures today shows that they now circulate far beyond the national context, playing a key role in how violence is recognized on the international stage.

These numbers are often accompanied by normative arguments: if a conflict is perceived as disproportionate or if the death toll becomes too high, it must be halted. Yet, there is no universal criterion for assessing what constitutes disproportionate force or an acceptable casualty threshold. In much of Western discourse, not all lives are valued equally. Recent studies have highlighted how the value assigned to deaths is entangled in moralistic and (il)liberal visions of violence, where the lives of those labeled as "terrorists" (and their associates) are deemed less valuable than those identified as "Western."

This was evident in the early days of coverage of the Hamas-Israel conflict: despite the obvious asymmetry of the violence, it was regularly framed as an acceptable response to Hamas' attacks, akin to self-defense. It took several weeks for widespread acknowledgment of the extreme brutality of the Israeli bombings to emerge, with the death toll in Gaza becoming so overwhelming by late October that it appeared to "speak for itself."

In this communication, I offer to explore how these numbers transitioned from mere tracking tools to central components of understanding the conflict’s dynamics, while addressing Israeli and U.S. objections regarding the credibility of these figures and, ultimately, questioning the limits of comprehension based on death tolls alone.