The official Palestinian death toll in Israel’s Gaza war likely underestimated the toll by 41 percent in the first nine months of the conflict, a study suggests, as the Gaza Strip’s health infrastructure deteriorated. is collapsed.
The peer-reviewed statistical analysis published Thursday in the journal The Lancet was conducted by academics from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Yale University and other institutions.
Using a statistical method called capture-recapture analysis, the researchers sought to assess the casualty toll of the Israeli air and ground campaign in Gaza between October 2023 and the end of June 2024.
As of June 30 last year, the Palestinian Health Ministry in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip reported a death toll of 37,877 during the war.
However, the new peer-reviewed study used ministry data, an online survey and social media obituaries to estimate that there had been between 55,298 and 78,525 deaths from traumatic injuries in Gaza as of this time.
The study’s best estimate of the death toll was 64,260, which would mean the Health Ministry had underestimated the number of deaths so far by 41 percent.
The study estimates that 59.1 percent of those killed were women, children and people aged over 65. It does not provide an estimate of the number of Palestinian fighters among the dead.
This figure represented 2.9 percent of Gaza’s pre-war population, “or approximately one in 35 inhabitants,” the study said.
The toll only covered deaths due to traumatic injuries, and therefore did not include deaths due to lack of health care or food, nor the thousands of missing believed to be buried under the rubble.
The Israeli war in Gaza has killed at least 46,006 Palestinians and injured 109,378 since October 7, 2023, according to the territory’s Health Ministry.
The war began on October 7, 2023, after attacks by Hamas across the border with Israel killed at least 1,139 people and led to the captivity of more than 200 people.
During the first months of the war, the Ministry of Health’s official death count was based entirely on bodies arriving at hospitals.
Later, other methods were used, including distributing an online survey to Palestinians inside and outside the Gaza Strip, who were asked to provide data on their numbers identity, their names, their age at death, their sex, the place of death and the source of the information.
The Lancet study noted that the Palestinian Health Ministry’s ability to maintain electronic death records had previously proven reliable, but has now deteriorated under the Israeli military campaign, which has included raids on hospitals and other healthcare facilities and disruptions to digital communications.
Gaza health officials said on Thursday that Al-Aqsa, Nasser and European hospitals were at imminent risk of closure, following repeated Israeli attacks and blockades of supplies. Kamal Adwan, Indonesian and al-Awda hospitals have already been forced to close.
Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud, working from Al-Aqsa hospital in Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, said many deaths were going unreported in the northern Gaza Strip, with bodies being buried in the courtyards of houses or in the streets, just as victims of a new Israeli offensive in the region cannot be brought to besieged hospitals.
“The entire health system in the northern part of the Gaza Strip is out of order, without any proper mechanism to record the number of casualties in the area,” he said.
“It is increasingly difficult to follow the killings during Israel’s continued attacks. »
He said Al-Aqsa Hospital was now overwhelmed by a recent influx of injured civilians, many of them women and children.
“Doctors are reporting a serious shortage of basic supplies, including surgical tools, antibiotics and painkillers,” he said.
Reporting from Deir-el Balah on Friday, Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum said the Israeli army was intensifying its attacks on residential areas.
“Medical teams at al-Awda Hospital continue to report that the Israeli army continues to bulldoze all residential houses near the hospital, while the medical cases remaining there deteriorate further, which could be a sign of a new Israeli escalation. will take place in the coming days,” he said.
Israel has repeatedly said it is going to great lengths to prevent civilian deaths and accuses Hamas of using hospitals as a cover for its operations, something the group has denied.
