The Israel-Hamas war has killed or injured at least 236,505 people in Gaza — 10% of the population before the war — according to one of four papers published last Tuesday as part of the Costs of War project at the Watson School for International and Public Affairs. The project also estimated that more than $21.7 billion of direct U.S. military aid has supported Israel’s intense military campaign in Gaza.
The papers follow a similar round of publications last year.
Like last year’s publications, research from this month’s papers has been widely cited, according to the project’s director Stephanie Savell PhD’17, who is a senior fellow at the Watson School. Savell noted that an Associated Press article featuring the research has been reposted by over 260 media outlets globally, including the Washington Post and ABC News, and the studies have been independently featured in original articles in more than 50 other outlets.
Costs of War research has become one of the definitive sources that policymakers and global media look to, according to Savell. Numbers found by the project’s researchers have been used to brief Senate Budget Committee staffers, and former President Joe Biden cited Costs of War research in his 2021 speech about the United States’ military withdrawal from Afghanistan, she added.
In their recent reports, the Costs of War project has tracked death tolls and U.S. military spending in the two years since Israel began its military operations in Gaza following the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel, which killed over 1,200 people and took 251 hostages.
One report focused primarily on the death toll in Gaza, two papers studied associated military spending and another study investigated mass displacement caused by the war.
In one paper, Neta Crawford PhD’85, a professor at the University of Oxford and a co-founder of the Costs of War project, examined “indirect deaths” — those who die from non-military effects of war, such as destroyed health care infrastructure and starvation — in addition to direct casualties. The total number of these indirect deaths is still unknown, the paper determined, as most of these deaths “occur long after the fighting stops.”
“A lot of critics have … called into question the Gaza Ministry of Health numbers, calling them an exaggeration,” Savell said of the direct death estimates in an interview with The Herald. “Our paper … shows that actually, if anything, the Gaza Ministry of Health numbers are an undercount, and that’s just of the direct deaths.”
A Costs of War paper by David Vine, a former professor of anthropology at American University, counted that at least 5.27 million people have been affected by mass displacement in Gaza, Israel, Iran, Lebanon and the West Bank since the beginning of the war. This estimate is “conservative,” according to the paper, and Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have been “forcibly displaced” an average of “three to four times each.”
Since Oct. 7, 2023, the U.S. has spent at least an additional $9 billion to $12 billion in military actions in the wider Middle East, separate from direct aid to Israel, according to another paper by Linda Bilmes, a senior lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School. This brings the estimated total U.S. military spending in the region during the time period to over $30 billion.
In addition, there are “tens of billions of dollars on the table for (arms sales) deals that will be concluded in the future,” according to William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the author of another Costs of War paper about overall U.S. military aid and arms transfers to Israel.
In an interview with The Herald, Hartung said that his paper aimed to draw attention to the fact that “the bread and butter of what (Israel) used to prosecute the war came from the United States and was paid for by U.S. taxpayers.”
But the dollar cost is only one piece of the picture, said Hartung, who added that the humanitarian impact is far more important. In addition to the “unnecessary suffering for huge numbers of people,” the United States’ enabling of the “unconscionable slaughter of innocent people” could discredit U.S. diplomacy in future conflicts, he said.
“It’s eroding international norms, international law (and) international guidelines that are not perfectly enforced, but at least used to be referred to,” Hartung said. “They’re bombing hospitals, they’re killing journalists, they’re bombing people on their way to try to get food aid.”
“If the United States is going to support and finance that, it weakens our reputation, but also weakens globally the enforcement of those basic rules,” he added.
Research from the Costs of War project aims to link “attention to the dollar costs with attention to the human toll,” Savell said. But both Savell and Harting noted that U.S. media has tended to give more exposure to the monetary figures.
“We think about that in a kind of a practical, pragmatic way,” Savell said. In this project, researchers are “strategically using” dollar costs to draw attention to larger humanitarian costs, she added.
This year, there is a “shifting tide in U.S. public opinion about U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza,” Savell said, noting that Senator Bernie Sanders and “many other experts in international organizations” have recently said Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
“Last year, it felt like we were more alone in pointing to the costs,” she added. “This year, it feels more like we’re part of a chorus of other voices.”
According to Savell, the Watson School “has always been a really supportive home institution for the Costs of War project.”
As for outside opinions, “while there have been a few critiques of our work, they’ve been political in nature,” she said. “There’s not been critiques that have been able to substantively refute the fact-based information that we are publishing.”
Though the ceasefire agreement negotiated in part by President Trump is “certainly better than things raging on uncontrollably,” Hartung said he believes that there are still many questions to be answered, including “Who will control Gaza in the future? Will the people involved in prosecuting the war be held accountable in any way?”
Elise Haulund is the managing editor of production and development for The Herald's 136th Editorial Board. She is from Redondo Beach, CA. Concentrating in English and biology, she has a passion for exploring the intersection between STEM and the humanities. Outside of writing, researching and editing, she enjoys ballet-dancing, cafe-hopping and bullet-journaling.
