How many palestinien have been killed since 1948-October 6th 2023

1. What the major official and partisan tallies say

The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) has publicly stated totals of “more than 134,000” martyrs since 1948 and related PCBS/Palestinian Ministry of Health releases place cumulative figures in the mid‑hundreds of thousands when including the heavy death toll from the October 2023 hostilities and its aftermath ^{[1] [2]}. Human rights organizations and databases such as B’Tselem compile detailed incident‑level databases for more recent decades (notably since 2000) and stress that methodology—whether to count combatants and civilians together and how to verify identity—drives substantial differences between tallies ^{[3] [4]}.

2. How timelines and methodologies change totals

Some sources (UN OCHA, B’Tselem, Statista compilations) focus on modern, verifiable records—OCHA publishes casualties since 2008 in the occupied Palestinian territory and explicitly holds off adding October 2023 figures until independent verification—while B’Tselem’s database is comprehensive from the Second Intifada onward but uses strict verification practices that differ from national ministry counts ^{[5] [4] [6]}. That means aggregate “since 1948” totals often mix different methods (national ministries’ broader, rapid reporting vs. NGO/UN verification), producing divergent headline numbers ^{[5] [4]}.

3. The specific problem with an exact number "to October 6, 2023"

None of the provided sources explicitly publish a single, independently verified cumulative total that stops exactly on 6 October 2023; most publicized round figures from Palestinian authorities and PCBS that say “since 1948” were updated after October 2023 and therefore include the mass casualties from the October 7–onward conflict ^{[1] [2]}. International and NGO databases either limit their public datasets to later verification windows (OCHA) or only comprehensively cover recent decades (B’Tselem) rather than providing a single continuous count from 1948 to a pre‑October‑2023 cut‑off in the materials provided ^{[5] [4]}.

4. Best estimate and its caveats, drawn from the reporting provided

Using the PCBS figures cited in the supplied material yields a working estimate of roughly 134,000–136,000 Palestinians killed since 1948—but that figure, as presented by PCBS/WAFA in the cited pieces, extends beyond 6 October 2023 and therefore overstates the number if the strict end date requested is enforced; the exact count up to 6 October 2023 cannot be isolated from these sources alone ^{[1] [2]}. Independent compilers and media (B’Tselem, OCHA, Statista, Reuters timelines) document large, confirmable death totals for post‑2000 years and show how much the October 2023–2024 period dramatically increased any multi‑decade tally, underscoring why precise pre‑7 October totals are sensitive to source selection and verification approach ^{[6] [5] [3] [7]}.

5. The political and evidentiary implications of divergent counts

Counting choices matter: national ministries report quickly and tend to include broad categories (civilian, combatant, diaspora), while UN and NGO datasets apply verification standards and narrower inclusion criteria—differences which reflect institutional mandates, political positioning, and operational capacity to verify deaths across decades of conflict ^{[5] [4]}. Users of these figures should therefore treat any single headline number as a product of methodology and agenda; the sources here show convergence on a very large cumulative toll since 1948 but do not permit an authoritative, independently verified single number that stops precisely at 6 October 2023 ^{[2] [1] [4]}.