According to findings announced by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and published in The Lancet journal, there were an estimated 64,260 “traumatic injury deaths” in Gaza between October 7, 2023 and June 30, 2024. The Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza put the figure at 37,877 at the time.
This means the ministry has underreported the death toll due to violence by approximately 41%, the researchers found. As of October, the number of Gazans killed by violence was thought to exceed 70,000, the study said, based on the estimated underreporting rate.
The total death toll attributable to Israel’s military campaign is likely to be higher still, it said, as its analysis doesn’t account for deaths caused by disruption to health care, insufficient food, clean water and sanitation, and disease outbreaks.
Official death tolls are always an undercount. Even after mundane disasters like hurricanes, the death toll gets revised up during the cleanup as more victims are discovered. The disaster in Gaza is still ongoing, so people have more important things to do than count the dead.
In addition to this, the Gaza Health Ministry has taken a deliberately conservative approach of only counting bodies that make it to a hospital and are clearly dead as a direct result of the conflict (e.g, not disease or famine).
The official death count is not a reflection of how many people are dying. It is a reflection of the Gaza Health Ministry’s capacity to count the dead.
More than 120,000 when including death from disease and malnutrition (see https://truthout.org/articles/us-health-workers-back-from-gaza-estimate-death-toll-is-at-least-119000/)
Just you wait, they’ll follow a playbook that has been used for a long time. First they’re gonna say that the official death toll, around 46,000 identified people, is incorrect. ‘Many of them were Hamas’ or ‘Hamas is inflating the death count.’
Once they realize the evidence overwhelmingly shows that the official death toll is an undercount, they’re going to say it’s not more than the official death toll, it can’t be more than the identified deaths. ‘It can’t be more than 46,000, there’s no evidence that it’s more than those already counted’ or ‘I won’t believe a higher number without a name and a body.’
Then, once they can’t away from the higher estimate, they’ll switch to exclusively justifying it. ‘It doesn’t matter, they all deserved it for supporting Hamas.’
Gee, I wonder why the ministry has been so conservative with their estimates?
Because they no longer exist, Every hospital has been bombed out of existence and doctors, surgeons and their families are targeted. My entire life of living in the west and believing their bullshit about becoming better, learning from their experience and “never again” Gaza has shown me if another world war happens, even if die immediate id rather be on the side opposing the west
Plus there is a lot of people who are “missing”, which does not get recorded centrally. Since a year an estimate of about 10.000 dead lying under the rubble is given. But the bombings have continued since then, so this “last” estimate is way outdated.
Was there even an accurate count of the Gazan population before the genocide began? Considering the conditions they were subject to, probably not. We may never actually know, especially in terms of percentages, how much of the Gazan population has been murdered.
Israel runs the population registry for Gaza. I am sure they have been looking very closely, given the extensive surveillance they have employed. Also people had it hard enough getting anything administrative done, if all the papers are in order. So not getting the papers by not registering the births would also be outside peoples interests.
Finally the “Hamas run health ministry” has provided reliable data about people killed in previous assaults, so before the collapse of the health system since October 2023, the data in Gaza was also solid.
