My project is titled "The Human Toll of the Gaza War," and is a data visualization and awareness campaign that I represented on a poster paper with tallies to represent deaths in thousands for both nations. My aim was to quantify the devastating human cost of the war in Gaza and show people the discrepancy between the two nations.
The ongoing Israel-Hamas war, which began on October 7, 2023, has resulted in a devastating crisis in the Gaza Strip and significant loss of life on both sides. The Israeli military offensive of airstrikes and ground operations has led to unprecedented destruction in Gaza. As of late 2025, the Palestinian death toll in Gaza has exceeded 70,000, with over 170,000 injured, nearly half of whom are women and children. The vast majority of Gaza's 2.3 million residents have been forcibly displaced multiple times, facing a severe hunger crisis and confirmed famine in some areas due to a tightened blockade and aid impediments. Widespread destruction of civilian infrastructure, including homes, hospitals, and agricultural land, has rendered large parts of Gaza uninhabitable. There have been attempts to stop all the bloodshed with a US-brokered ceasefire agreement that went into effect in October 2025, which included hostage and prisoner exchanges and an increase in aid flow. However, the ceasefire remains fragile, with an Israeli strike on Wednesday, December 3, killing a militant in Khan Younis. Efforts to maintain and fortify the "yellow line" (a poorly defined buffer zone within Gaza) are ongoing, but incidents continue to test the truce.
The international community, including the UN Security Council, has called for a lasting resolution based on a two-state solution and adherence to international law. Humanitarian access remains a critical issue, with aid workers continuing to face impediments and the UN calling for more crossings to open to address the ongoing catastrophic conditions. Before my midterm and even my finale, I knew very little about what was happening and why and I'm glad that I got to inform myself and others
The poster translates the deaths of thousands that we don't feel even though we may see clips on the news or the internet. The graph used minimalist tallies, where each mark represented a thousand lives lost, in order to humanize the numbers often cited abstractly in news reports. I chose this topic because the scale of human suffering in the Gaza conflict felt under represented and I wanted to spread the word. I wanted a form of outreach that the media fatigue and compelled viewers to pause and recognize the magnitude of the tragedy. The form of outreach I chose was a video of me making my poster at a park by my house and posting it to YouTube.
My message is simple yet urgent: conflict has a profound, dehumanizing human toll that affects real people in staggering numbers. The project demands that the audience confront the scale of the loss of life directly, moving beyond political arguments to acknowledge the shared vulnerability and universal tragedy of war.
the design and intent of "The Human Toll of the Gaza War" were heavily inspired by artists and projects that use minimalism and repetition to highlight immense scale and suffering Maya Lin (Vietnam Veterans Memorial): Chris Jordan (Running the Numbers series) The New York Times "The 100,000 Americans Killed by Opioids" visualization
My video:
sources:
https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/11/1166356
https://www.washingtonpost.com/israel-hamas-war/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/israel-hamas-war
https://www.cnn.com/world/middleeast/israel
https://www.scmp.com/topics/israel-gaza-war
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