“Reading the health experts, I am starting to think with horror that if it’s not stopped, Israel’s assault could end up exterminating almost the entire population in Gaza over the next couple of years,” Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine, wrote on Friday on social media.
Albanese cited a recent report from University of Edinburgh global public health chair Devi Sridhar finding that the true death toll from Israel’s genocide could be estimated at 335,500 as of September.
Sridhar based this rough calculation off of an estimate by public health researchers published in The Lancet in July regarding typical indirect death counts from previous conflicts, citing research hailed as the gold standard in the field. At that time, the researchers estimated that the true death toll could be roughly 186,000, stemming from direct killings like bombings as well as Israel’s destruction of the health, food and sanitation systems in Gaza.
The death toll, then, could be between 15 and 20 percent of the population by the end of this year, Albanese said, in just over a year of Israel’s genocide. And, as Sridhar writes in her Guardian report, the calculation that she borrows from The Lancet editorial is highly conservative — meaning the death toll could be even higher than her 335,500 estimate.
The “gold standard in the field” is apparently to multiply the Hamas numbers by five. I’m not kidding. That’s where the 186,000 number comes from. This is low-effort bullshit.
Edit: Also this article is just wrong about what the 335,500 number is claimed to be. It is what you get if you extrapolate the 186,000 number to the end of the year, not to September.
The official Hamas number only includes bodies that have been bagged and tagged. This requires 1) a full or partial body able to be positively identified and 2) a functioning healthcare system able to do the identification.
Do you ever wonder why the official Hamas death toll has been stuck at around 30k for many months now, despite the near-daily massacres of 50, 100, or even 200 Palestinians at a time?
The “Hamas” number is just the official number provided by whatever healthcare workers are still alive after Israel’s year-long explicit campaign to vaporise them.
Almost every conflict/genocide in history has way lower official death tolls because of exactly this: Either the victims are killed off before they can report their own numbers, or there is simply no means to confirm every death. If an entire family is crushed under rubble, you’re not going to be able to report that.
The numbers given (5x the official number or whatever) is through analysis of these historical tragedies and the discrepancy between the official/initial totals and the “accurate”/researched totals.
It might be crude, but it is much more reflective of the very visible disaster being allowed to unfold than the Gaza Health Ministry which is barely able to account for a hundred dead per day. It is likely even more, considering the thousands in death/torture camps set up across the Zionist state; Many of these prisoners were taken from work on October 7th/8th and haven’t been freed since.
This estimate includes people that haven’t died yet, but that die from causes that are attributable to the war.
I understand that that’s the intent. The problem is the methodology, which is as I said just multiplication by five. Calling it a gold standard implies that there’s actually some sophisticated analysis going on, and there isn’t.
The factor is derived from extensive analysis and sound research. and the factor 5 is on the low end. The spread easily goes up to 10 indirect deaths per recorded death. And that is with there being some sort of infrastructure left. Israel deliberately annihilated all of it and continues to do so.
To show you how silly your argument is. “it is just multiplication by some factor” is also applied to gravitational force and many other physical phenomenon.