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Tel Aviv — More than 600 people were killed in Israeli military attacks Gaza Strip in the first 10 days of 2025, pushing the death toll past 46,000 since the war began on Oct. 7, 2023, according to the Hamas-run Palestinian Territory’s health ministry, and one new estimate suggests it could be much higher. Israel launched the war after Hamas carried out its unprecedented terror attack, killing around 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages.
The total death toll in Gaza represents just over 2% of the tiny enclave’s population, with an average of around 3,000 people killed every month or 100 killed every day since Hamas-led terrorists invaded southern Israel 15 months ago.
Israel rejected the figures from Palestinian officials and blamed Hamas for all the deaths in Gaza, accusing the group of using civilians as human shields. But new research published in the medical journal The Lancet suggests that the figure provided by Gaza’s health ministry for the first nine months of the war may have been an underestimate by as much as 40%.
The number of dead in Gaza is underestimated, the Lancet study shows
From the start of the war to June 30, 2024, Gaza’s health ministry said just under 38,000 people had been killed by traumatic injuries, but the Lancet’s estimate — published in a peer-reviewed study based on data from health authorities, obituaries on social media and an online survey — more than 64,000 people were killed at the time.
CBS News cannot independently verify the figures, and Israeli authorities have prevented Western journalists from entering Gaza to report independently since the war began.
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The Lancet noted that its estimate did not include thousands more people believed to be still buried under the rubble or those who died due to lack of food, water or medical care during the war.
“I’m broken inside after losing my family,” 21-year-old Mahmoud Sukkar told CBS News’ local team in Gaza. All 17 members of his family were killed, including his mother, father and twin brother, when an Israeli strike hit their home in Gaza City in the first month of the war.
Sukkar, the sole survivor, now lives alone in a tent camp in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza.
“I don’t have any wishes,” Sukkar said. “I want to visit my family’s graves. My only wish is to visit their graves.”
Israel continues its attacks on the Houthis in Yemen
As Israel continues to attack remnants of Hamas, the Israel Defense Forces said on Friday that its navy and air force had carried out multiple strikes Target of Houthi rebels on Yemen’s west coast and inland, including ports and a power plant.
The Houthis, like Hamas, are backed by Iran and have launched repeated missile and drone attacks on commercial shipping, US and Israeli military vessels and Israeli territory in support of their allies since the start of the Gaza war. The US has also carried out many strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen over the past year.
“The terrorist Houthi regime is a central part of Iran’s axis of terror, and their attacks on international shipping and routes continue to destabilize the region and the entire world,” the IDF said in a statement.
“As we promised – the Houthis are paying, and will continue to pay, a high price for their aggression against us,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a separate statement.
Progress, but no progress in the ceasefire negotiations
Meanwhile, in Doha, Qatar, US and Arab negotiators made “real progress” this week on a deal between Israel and Hamas on a ceasefire and hostage release in the final days of the Biden administration, the US president said on Thursday, but did not seemed sufficient to announce any major discovery or to justify the return of high-level officials to the region.
“We’re making real progress, I met with negotiators today,” Mr. Biden told reporters at the White House. “I still hope we can have a prisoner exchange. Hamas is the one standing in the way of that exchange right now, but I think maybe we can do it, we have to do it.”
US envoys Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk worked to agree on the technical details of the proposal, but Israeli intelligence chief David Barnea did not fly to Doha this week because Israeli media said he might, and there was no indication that CIA chief William I Burns was in Qatar. Both have repeatedly joined the negotiations when there was hope for a potential deal.
One apparent point of contention in the talks was the unconfirmed status of 34 Israeli hostages in Gaza listed on a document re-released by Hamas this week after it first surfaced last summer. Israel demanded to know who was still alive and who was dead on the list. Hamas demanded a four-day ceasefire to contact its network of militants across Gaza to confirm the condition of the hostages, saying ongoing Israeli operations made it impossible for the group to assess otherwise.
Family members and friends of the hostages have regularly protested in Israel demanding that Netanyahu’s government reach an agreement to bring them all home at the same time. Israeli officials believe around 100 hostages are still being held by Hamas or its allies in Gaza, although at least 30 are believed to be dead.
If the ceasefire does go through, the first phase would include a hostage exchange for Palestinians held in Israeli prisons, along with an increase in humanitarian aid to Gaza.
But another major obstacle is Hamas’s continued demand that Israeli forces withdraw completely from the Gaza Strip – something Israel has so far refused to accept.
Some Israelis and Palestinians hope for “Donald Trump’s help”
If a deal is not reached by the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump on January 20, some Israelis — and Palestinians — hope it will bring a needed change to the negotiations, potentially for the better.
“He is unpredictable and brave,” Ilay David, the brother of 24-year-old hostage Eyvatar David, told CBS News at a rally in Jerusalem on Friday afternoon. “We have to think outside the box, and Trump can bring about that change.”
“Donald Trump is known for being mostly a businessman,” said 19-year-old Palestinian cybersecurity student Ameen Abu Fkheida at Birzeit University in Ramallah, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. “I don’t think he will be a friend (of the Palestinians), but I think there will be some kind of help from Donald Trump regarding the Gaza case, which could probably be a ceasefire or a prisoner exchange or something like that to de-escalate the current situation in Gaza.”
