Fact check: Prematurity is the biggest global killer of children under five

A widely shared online post claimed that “the number one cause of child deaths on Earth this year is israel (sic).”

Evaluation

Although global child mortality figures are not yet available for 2025, there are many varied causes that result in far more deaths than the number killed during Israel’s actions in Gaza since October 2023.

The facts

Casualty numbers from the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip as of April 15 2025 claim that since the Israeli offensive in Gaza started after the October 7 2023 attacks, a total of 15,613 children have died. 

As of January 8 2025, the same dataset recorded a total of 13,319 child deaths since October 2023.

The difference in those figures indicates that in the year so far – the time frame used in the viral claim – around 2,294 children in Gaza have died.

The Gaza Health Ministry is part of the Hamas-led government in the Palestinian territory and some of its statistics have been disputed by Israel.

Israel also argues that civilian deaths in the Gaza Strip can be the result of action taken by Hamas, claiming the organisation uses civilians as “human shields”.

But even using these statistics and assuming every child fatality in Gaza could be attributed to Israel, the number of reported fatalities among children is far lower than other causes of death for that age group around the world.

Finding directly comparable statistics for the first few months of 2025 is difficult. World Health Organisation (WHO) data on the cause of deaths among children focuses on those under five years old, and their latest data is from 2023.

But that data reveals there are 12 different causes of mortality that each killed more than 100,000 children in 2023.

These are listed as: prematurity; acute lower respiratory infections; other group 1 and other noncommunicable causes; birth asphyxia and birth trauma; malaria; diarrhoeal diseases; congenital anomalies; injuries; sepsis and other infectious conditions of the newborn; tuberculosis; measles; and meningitis/encephalitis.

Each of these causes killed between around six and 60 times as many children in 2023 as the number of children who have been reported killed in Gaza since the start of the hostilities around 18 months ago.

Prematurity – the single biggest killer identified by the WHO data – was responsible for the death of more than 920,000 children globally in 2023. This is around 59 times as many children as the 15,613 figure the Health Ministry data says have been killed in Gaza in the year-and-a-half of conflict.

Malaria killed around 450,000 children in 2023, the data shows. Tuberculosis killed nearly 140,000, measles killed more than 113,000 and meningitis/encephalitis killed a little over 100,000.

Links

Post on X (archived)

OCHA – Reported impact snapshot | Gaza Strip (15 April 2025) (archived)

Reported impact snapshot | Gaza Strip (8 January 2025) (archived)

AP – What is Gaza’s Ministry of Health and how does it calculate the war’s death toll? (archived)

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on X (archived post and video)

WHO – Number of under-five deaths – by cause, dashboard (archived downloaded dataset)

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