A study published this Friday in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet estimates that the death toll in Gaza during the first nine months of the war between Israel and Hamas is 64,260, a figure 41% higher than that of the Gaza Strip Health Ministry, monitored by Hamas, which counted 37,877 deaths over the same period. This figure represents 2.9% of Gaza’s pre-war population, “i.e. approximately one in 35 inhabitants”, according to the study.
The number of people killed in Gaza has been the subject of fierce debate since Israel launched its military campaign against Hamas in response to the attack on its territory on October 7, 2023. While Israel has questioned the credibility figures from the Gaza Ministry of Health, they were deemed reliable by the United Nations. The human toll is considerable, but the figures are extremely difficult to verify, explained in October CheckNews, the fact-checking service Liberation.
Three cross-referenced lists
Led among others by researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Yale University, in the United States, the study of Lancet looked at direct deaths caused by “traumatic injuries”. The authors used a statistical method called “capture-recapture”, which has already been used to estimate the number of deaths in other conflicts around the world, and which is based on three lists: that provided by the Ministry of Defense Health, which includes bodies identified in hospitals or morgues; another from an online survey launched by the same ministry, in which Palestinians reported the deaths of their loved ones; and a last established from obituaries published on social networks like X, Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, when the identity of the deceased could be verified. The researchers then examined the lists for duplicates. “We looked for overlaps between the three lists […] in order to obtain a total estimate of the population killed”, Zeina Jamaluddine, epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told AFP.
Only people “whose death had been confirmed by their relatives or by morgues and hospitals” were counted. This toll therefore does not include the thousands of missing people believed to be buried under the rubble – nearly 10,000 inhabitants, according to the United Nations humanitarian agency OCHA – nor does it include indirect deaths, due to lack of care or of food due to the humanitarian tragedy which struck the enclave at the same time as the bombs: hunger, diseases, population displacements. Or the impossibility of caring for patients due to the collapse of the health system – the Kamal-Adwan hospital, the last still operating in the Gaza Strip, was put out of service at the end of December by a raid of the Israeli army, which arrested its staff and its director, Doctor Hossam Abou Safiya. Which means that even if revised upwards by the Lancet, the human toll is probably still underestimated.
-“Good estimate”
The study authors urged caution, explaining that lists published by hospitals do not always indicate the cause of death, so it is possible that people with non-traumatic health problems, such as a heart attack, were included, which could lead to an overestimation. Despite this, Patrick Ball, a statistician with the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, based in the United States, who was not involved in the study Lancet, but who used the statistical method of capture-recapture to estimate the number of deaths during conflicts in Guatemala, Kosovo, Peru and Colombia, assured AFP that this proven technique had proven itself over a long time and qualified the study of Lancet of “good guess”. Kevin McConway, professor of applied statistics at the British Open University, told AFP that there was “inevitably a lot of uncertainty” when making an estimate from incomplete data. However, he judged «admirable» that the researchers used three methods of statistical analysis to verify their estimates. “Overall, I find these estimates reasonably convincing,” he said.
The latest report published Thursday by the enclave’s Ministry of Health reported 46,006 deaths during the fifteen months of war, mainly in Israeli bombings.
