For two years officials in Germany dismissed Gaza’s death toll as propaganda. Now the Max Planck Institute has released estimates that make such denial impossible – and echo the patterns of past genocides
2 Dec 2025
A new estimate by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock paints a devastating picture of the death toll in Gaza. According to its findings, at least 100,000 Palestinians were killed in the first two years of the Gaza genocide. The real number is probably far higher, according to the study. The research team gives a range of 100,000 to 126,000 deaths – with a midpoint of roughly 112,000.
It is not just the scale that is shocking, but also the pattern of the killing and the demographic details. More than a quarter of those killed – about 27 per cent – were children under the age of 15. Another quarter, roughly 24 per cent, were women. Well over half of those who were killed could not – by any statistical measure – have been part of any armed group. This alone collapses one of the central pillars of Israel’s propaganda campaign.
The study also stresses that this distribution bears no resemblance to “classic” conflicts. Instead, it explicitly states that the demographic profile mirrors the patterns the United Nations documented in previous cases of genocide, such as in Rwanda in 1994.
Is this now the breaking point we have been waiting for?
Germany did not just support Israel’s genocide, it facilitated it
The genocidal features of the Gaza war were obvious for nearly two years. But when one of Germany’s most prestigious research institutions indicates that Gaza does, in fact, resemble past genocides, what follows from that? After all, Germany did far more than offer political support to Israel. It backed Israel’s assault on Gaza both militarily and legally – through arms exports, diplomatic cover and its defence before international courts. As the historian Omer Bartov put it in a recent interview on Nullpunkt: Germany did not just support the Gaza genocide. It facilitated it.
Numbers alone do not prove anything. As international-law scholars and historians have pointed out, genocide is not necessarily determined by body counts; formally, it can be attributed without a single act of killing. And yet, the Max Planck figures constitute a clear indication that the violence in Gaza is not just a tragic “side effect” of Israel’s warfare, such as politicians and the majority of German media have long claimed – and in some cases continue to claim.
Instead, they confirm what many ordinary people have understood by now: that indiscriminate killing is not incidental – but an integral part of Israel’s military strategy.
The numbers point to the partial realisation of an annihilationist logic repeatedly and openly expressed by Israeli politicians and media outlets such as Israel’s own version of Radio Rwanda: Channel 14. The extreme mortality among children, women, and the elderly indicates a mode of warfare that targeted Gaza’s population as a whole – systematically and deliberately.
None of this is new. Human rights organisations, scholars and journalists have documented and analysed the patterns of Israeli violence in Gaza with precision since the earliest days following 7 Oct. Revelations about Israel’s AI-targeting-systems – reported by +972 Magazine as early as April 2024 – should have made it unmistakably clear just how arbitrary Israel’s military conduct has been from the first days.
According to the Gaza Health Ministry, Israel has killed roughly 72,500 Palestinians since 7 Oct. Hundreds of thousands more people were injured, many of them with life-altering wounds like amputations.
In Germany, these figures were routinely doubted, dismissed or ignored. Even centre-left outlets like Zeit and taz have published pieces casting Gaza’s statistics as inherently suspect – often relying on false numbers and on sources that turned out to disseminate Israeli war propaganda.
Hamas had had its own reasons for understating the Gaza death toll
This was despite ample evidence from earlier Israeli military assaults on Gaza – in 2009, 2012, 2014 and 2021 – that casualty figures from Gaza’s Health Ministry had consistently matched the numbers later verified by the United Nations and other independent bodies. Plus, over the past year, mounting evidence suggested that Hamas – facing a decline in local popularity in Gaza – had incentive to understate the death toll, rather than to inflate it.
For well over a year, independent researchers and scholars have warned that Gaza’s real death toll is probably vastly higher than the official numbers suggest. The Costs of War Project, for example, has been working with estimates far above the figures released publicly – clear evidence that the scale of killing has been underestimated.
Medical experts reached similar conclusions early on. In a letter from American physicians to President Biden, written more than a year ago, in October 2024, the death toll was estimated at roughly 118,000. Public-health researchers, writing in The Lancet, put the cumulative number of deaths – including indirect fatalities and those still missing – at over 186,000. That was in the summer of 2024, a year and a half ago.
The gap between these estimates is mostly methodological: some models are simply more conservative, others more expansive. A major source of uncertainty is the sheer number of people still buried beneath the rubble. On a narrow strip of land, roughly 50m tons of debris now cover entire neighbourhoods. The UN estimates that clearing it will take several decades.
Despite all this, it seems to matter that the latest figures come from the Max Planck Institute. Earlier estimates that matched, or exceeded, the Gaza Health Ministry’s numbers barely even registered in the German press. This case feels different.
Politically, the report confronts the international community with a series of uncomfortable questions, with Germany being the frontrunner among them. It also casts an unflattering light on Western media, which could have recognised the warning signs far earlier – and should have framed and contextualised them accordingly. That did nott happen. If anything, the opposite did.
The institute itself is not exempt from such scrutiny. Last year, the Max Planck Society fired the anthropologist Ghassan Hage after the Axel Springer daily Die Welt published a defamatory piece on him, based on a handful of online posts in which he stated, among other things, that Israel was committing a genocide.
Despite growing internal pressure, it also repeatedly reaffirmed its ties to Israeli research institutions – even after Israeli war crimes in Gaza had been extensively documented, and the role of Israeli universities in the war machine meticulously mapped. If researchers at Max Planck now identify a demographic pattern that amounts – even just indirectly – to genocide, the institute would do well to critically, and publicly, re-examine its own institutional positions.
The bitterest truth about Gaza’s death toll is this: we will probably never know the precise number of those who were killed. Not because the toll is unknowable, but because so many victims remain buried under the rubble – never registered, never even counted. The Max Planck Institute’s median estimate of 112,000 is, in that sense, an echo of political failure toward Palestine. That echo will endure – even if the world keeps looking away.
Hanno Haunestein is a Berlin-based freelance journalist who specialises, inter alia, in German-Israeli relations, German memory culture and the politics of the Israel-Palestine conflict