The number of deaths from bombs and other trauma during the first nine months of the Gaza war may have been underestimated by more than 40 percent, according to a new analysis published in The Lancet.
A peer-reviewed statistical analysis led by epidemiologists from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine used modeling to provide an objective third-party estimate of casualties. The United Nations relies on figures from the Hamas-led health ministry, which it says are largely accurate, but Israel has criticized as exaggerated.
However, new analysis suggests that the Hamas Health Ministry tally is a significant undercount. The researchers found that from October 2023 to the end of June 2024, Israeli airstrikes and ground operations in Gaza killed around 64,300 people, rather than the 37,900 reported by the Palestinian Ministry of Health. I concluded.
The analysis estimates that 2.9 percent of Gaza’s pre-war population, or 1 in 35 residents, died from trauma. The analysis does not take into account other war-related casualties, such as deaths from malnutrition and water-borne diseases, and the collapse of health systems as the conflict progresses.
The study found that 59 percent of the deaths were women, children, and people over 65 years old. It was not clear what proportion of the reported deaths were combatants.
Mike Spagat, an expert on calculating casualties from wars who was not involved in the study, said the new analysis convinced him that casualties in Gaza were underestimated.
“This is good evidence that the real numbers are higher, probably significantly higher, than the official numbers from the Ministry of Health, and higher than I thought for the past few months,” Dr. Spagat said. Royal Holloway College, University of London.
However, providing exact numbers, such as the 41% underreporting of mortality rates, is less likely, as actual analysis shows that the real total may be lower or significantly higher. He said it was of no use. “Quantitatively speaking, what’s coming out in the paper is much more uncertain than I thought,” Dr. Spagat said.
Researchers found that the “confidence interval” for their estimate of 64,260 trauma deaths was 55,298 to 78,525, meaning the actual number of casualties was likely within that range. said.
If the estimated level of underreporting of deaths through June 2024 is extrapolated to October 2024, the total casualties of Gaza residents in the first year of the war would exceed 70,000.
Epidemiologist Francesco Cecchi said: “Deaths from war-related injuries are important, because whether these operations are proportionate and whether adequate provisions are in place to actually avoid civilian casualties.” This is because it speaks to the problem.” The study author is a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine with expertise in conflict and humanitarian crises. “I think it’s important to commemorate. There’s an inherent value in just trying to come up with the right numbers.”
The analysis uses a statistical technique called capture-recapture analysis that has been used to estimate casualties in other conflicts, such as the Colombian and Sudanese civil wars.
Regarding Gaza, researchers have created three lists. The first is a registry maintained by the Palestinian Ministry of Health, which mainly consists of the dead in hospital morgues and an estimate of the number of undiscovered people buried in the rubble. The second is deaths reported by family members and local residents through an online survey form set up by the ministry on January 1, 2024, when the pre-war death registration system had collapsed. It asked Palestinians inside and outside Gaza to provide the victims’ names, ages, national ID numbers, and places of death. A third source of information is obituaries of people who died from their injuries published on social media, which may not contain all the same biographical details and were manually edited by researchers. It is something.
Researchers analyzed these sources and looked for people on multiple lists of murdered people. A high level of overlap suggests that there are very few uncounted deaths. The low amounts they found suggested the opposite. The researchers used a model to calculate the probability that each individual would appear on one of three lists.
“With the model, we can actually estimate the number of people who are not on the list at all,” Dr. Cecchi said. Combining this with the numbers listed gave us the analyst total.
Patrick Ball, head of research at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group and a statistician who has made similar estimates of violent deaths in conflicts in other regions, said the study was strong and well-founded. . However, he cautioned that the authors may be underestimating the amount of uncertainty caused by the ongoing conflict.
Although the authors used different variations of mathematical models in their calculations, Dr. Ball suggested that rather than provide a single figure of 64,260 deaths as an estimate, Dr. He said it would have been more appropriate to present the figure as a range up to 47,457 people. The number of deaths is 88,332, and this range includes all estimates generated by modeling overlap between the three lists.
“It’s really difficult to do something like this in the middle of a conflict,” Dr. Ball said. “It takes time, and it requires access. I think you could say it’s broader in scope, and that makes sense.”
Gaza had a strong death registration process before the war, but its functionality is limited now that much of the medical system has been destroyed. If an entire family is killed at the same time and no one can report it, or if a large building collapses and an unknown number of people die, the deaths are not counted. Dr Cecchi said more and more Gazans were being buried near their homes, rather than going through a morgue.
The study’s authors acknowledged that some of those thought dead may actually be missing and were likely captured in Israel.
Roni Caryn Rabin and Lauren Leatherby contributed reporting.
