Gaza war death toll 41% higher than estimated, Lancet study finds

The Gaza war began on October 7, 2023 after Hamas gunmen stormed across the border with Israel, killing 1200 people and taking more than 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.

The Lancet study said the Palestinian Health Ministry’s capacity for maintaining electronic death records had previously proven reliable, but deteriorated under Israel’s assaults, which have included raids on hospitals and other healthcare facilities and disruptions to digital communications.

Israel accuses Hamas of using hospitals as cover for its operations, which the militant group denies.

Study method employed in other conflicts

Anecdotal reports suggested that a significant number of dead remained buried in the rubble of destroyed buildings and were therefore not included in some tallies.

To better account for such gaps, the Lancet study employed a method used to evaluate deaths in other conflict zones, including Kosovo and Sudan.

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Using data from at least two independent sources, researchers look for individuals who appear on multiple lists of those killed. Less overlap between lists suggests more deaths have gone unrecorded, information that can be used to estimate the full number of deaths.

For the Gaza study, researchers compared the official Palestinian Health Ministry death count, which in the first months of war was based entirely on bodies that arrived in hospitals but later came to include other methods; an online survey distributed by the Health Ministry to Palestinians inside and outside the Gaza Strip, who were asked to provide data on Palestinian ID numbers, names, age at death, sex, location of death, and reporting source; and obituaries posted on social media.

“Our research reveals a stark reality: the true scale of traumatic injury deaths in Gaza is higher than reported,” lead author Zeina Jamaluddine told Reuters.

Dr Paul Spiegel, director of the Centre for Humanitarian Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told Reuters that the statistical methods deployed in the study provided a more complete estimate of the death toll in the war.

The study focused solely on deaths caused by traumatic injuries, he said.

Deaths caused from indirect effects of conflict, such as disrupted health services and poor water and sanitation, often cause high excess deaths, said Spiegel, who co-authored a study last year that projected thousands of deaths due to the public health crisis spawned by the war.

The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) estimates that, on top of the official death toll, about another 11,000 Palestinians are missing and presumed dead.

In total, PCBS said, citing Palestinian Health Ministry numbers, the population of Gaza has fallen 6 per cent since the start of the war, as about 100,000 Palestinians have also left the enclave.

Reuters