Stuart Casey-Maslen, head of the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights, told Anadolu News Agency in early February 2026 that Gaza’s population has fallen by more than 10 percent since October 2023. If those demographic indicators hold, he said, the implied death toll would far exceed the figures currently cited by the Palestinian Health Ministry. “We’re talking over 200,000 if those figures are correct,” Casey-Maslen said.

He was careful to distinguish between confirmed and estimated deaths. The Health Ministry’s toll — exceeding 72,000 as of early February — counts only bodies that have been recovered and documented by hospitals. It cannot account for the tens of thousands of people buried under rubble, the bodies in areas that ambulance and civil defense teams cannot reach, or the deaths that occurred in collapsed infrastructure without medical documentation.

“We do not believe that that is the final total,” Casey-Maslen said. “There will be more bodies under the rubble.”

The Geneva Academy assessment echoes earlier analysis published in The Lancet, which had also warned that official counts dramatically understate actual mortality when accounting for indirect deaths — the people killed not by bombs but by the destruction of the water system, the healthcare system, the food supply, and the sanitation infrastructure that keeps a civilian population alive. The Lancet analysis estimated that for every direct death in a conflict of this scale, multiple indirect deaths follow.

The Academy also warned that reconstruction of Gaza will require years and billions of dollars — a projection made without any indication of when or whether Israel will permit the conditions that would allow reconstruction to begin. As of early February, Israeli forces were still demolishing buildings, firing on displaced civilians, and blocking humanitarian access missions.

72,000 confirmed dead. 200,000 estimated. The gap between those numbers is not a rounding error. It is the scale of what has been buried.