CATASTROPHIC Gaza Death Figures Explode!

Right, so once again the official death figures being collated for Gaza in light of Israel’s continued and unabating atrocity there have been questioned by the worlds oldest leading medical journal The Lancet, who’s previous study into Gazan death tolls found that the official count was likely being grossly underestimated and this was for all manner of reasons, but mainly due to the numbers of missing people not being officially counted as dead, even though they almost certainly were and therefore bearing that in mind, they came up with an underestimation in the count last June by a multiple of four.
Well now the Lancet has revisited it’s figures, only going up until June of last year as they had done previously, because since then, the Gaza health ministry, and the health system there which provided all the official figures has collapsed, so by using a statistical model based on the count and their own previous research, The Lancet has been able to estimate the true catastrophic underestimation in the death toll through to mid 2024, through the period where reporting of deaths could no longer be considered consistent or accurate and it shows the official figures we have been hearing about over the last 6 months or so have likely been underestimated by a staggering 41%.
Right, so once again when too many around the world have sought to play down the catastrophe that is the Gaza Strip and the massive scale of loss of life there on the basis of Israel having a right to defend itself against a land a people they already illegally occupied and abused, The Lancet exposes the reality of the situation by applying science to this situation and this important in the context of warfare, because without accurate ideas of numbers, it is difficult to quantify the crime so justice can be pursued, it is difficult to memorialise the deaths that have occurred for the families and the people affected so they can process and move forwards and it is too easy for vested interests to play down a situation when it goes grossly underestimated.
Between October 7th of 2023 and June of last year, the official death toll in Gaza stood at an already horrendous 38,000, however official death tolls, bodies adding to the count, only happen when a hospital can verify the identity and the death and report it to the Gazan Ministry of Health, too often referred to as the Hamas Ministry of Health to play down anything they said in the media, yet for years have been considered one of the most accurate reporting bodies to the UN on such statistics that existed. The Health ministry relied on hospitals, but increasingly had to rely on first responders, ambulance crews, even the media to report figures which was less accurate, less verifiable.
The failure to establish a ceasefire has made data collection on an accurate death toll harder and of course there were all the missing people on top of this. At this point in time, 35% of all structures in Gaza had been brought down by the IDF. People would be buried under them, it is estimated it will take years to recover them all and so The Lancet referred to experts such as Airwars, a non profit transparency watchdog that tracks, assesses and investigates civilian casualties in conflict zones in order to reliably and independently more importantly, track and document the human cost of this war.
All in all, The Lancet’s study from last year arrived at a ratio of 4:1, where for every direct and verified death, there would be 4 who weren’t, which was just the most shocking news.
But taking the Gaza Health Ministry figures and attributing a ratio of 4 indirect deaths to every direct death in Gaza to arrive at their estimate and this was also based on a UN study from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime titled the ‘Global Burden of Armed Conflict’ a 310 page study if you care to go through the whole thing, but ultimately therefore this was not an unreasonable guide on such matters and that brought matters up to a then death toll estimate of 186,000 people, which would account for roughly 8% of the entire Gazan population.
It should be noted by way of a caveat, and not one erring on the side of caution here, the Lancet believes even that might be a conservative figure, that an Action On Armed Violence commissioned study from February of last year calculated that without a ceasefire, with the death toll at that point being some 28,000 people, there would be an eventual death toll of some 58,000 people due to those indirect factors and that was assuming there would be no health epidemic or escalation in violence, both of which we’ve sadly seen with polio returning to Gaza, all manner of water borne diseases arising and famine conditions. We’ve also seen far more violence and of course it became far more widespread since then having reached every part of Gaza since. The estimate should that come to pass for fatalities then rose to more than 85,000.
However, this now brings us to the here and now and The Lancet’s latest report into death toll figures, because of course, the Gazan Health Ministry has essentially been rendered useless. Reliant on hospitals to report data on deaths can’t happen when the hospitals themselves have become targets, have been destroyed, so how can we possibly keep tabs on the ongoing death toll now? Well it’s not for lack of trying on the Health Ministry’s part and they have been reporting death figures, but with fewer facilities able to do so, the spectre of underestimation since last June, since hospitals became targeted far more has grown, the death records having become increasingly unreliable.
Well to get around this a joint study by Yale University, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and other institutions embarked on a statistical analysis to see if they couldn’t come up with a more accurate projection of the real death toll seen since records became more accurate and they employed a method called capture-recapture analysis, which is a sampling analysis usually used to estimate populations, but works very well in instances such as this where not all relevant data is recorded and was used successfully in previous wars in Sudan and Kosovo. It works by collating data from two separate verifiable sources to assess overlap, the data in those incuding morgue records, surveys of respondents and obituaries posted to social media. In this case it was used to ascertain where a given death record occurs twice in the source material and where this didn’t happen. The closer both sources are in capture-recapture analysis, the less likely there would be a discrepancy, but by applying this method to Gaza to reported traumatic injury deaths, this has produced an estimated underestimate in Gaza Health Ministry death reporting of some 41%.
Now this is a downwards revision from the Lancet’s earlier report of course, because that would represent a death figure now of not 189,000 at the time the Gaza Health Ministry was reporting a death toll at the end of last June, when they were quoting a figure of some 38,000, but would be a figure nearer the 70,000 mark. Still a sickening high figure, still representing 3% of the total population of the Gaza Strip still a genocide and a war crime, 59% of those killed were women, children and the elderly over the age of 65 and still there are those who must be held to account and face justice for that, but again there are caveats here.
Even now these figures do not again make allowance for disease outbreaks, insufficient water supplies, insufficient food supplies and the disruption to access to healthcare in no small part caused by the destruction of hospitals and other healthcare facilities, the very facilities that were providing the accurate death toll data previously of course, these are all indirect deaths linked to the genocide, so these latest figures are very much on Israel as being linked directly to their depravity. That still strikes me, given the blockading of aid, the disease outbreaks already mentioned, the lack of medicine and access to them by those same blockades as a significant limitation of this latest study, indirect deaths are after all on Israel too and they are historically always the bigger causes of death ultimately, so where this study appears to be a dramatic underestimate of the previous one published by the Lancet, the previous figure may still be nearer the reality when all things are considered. Israel have after all blocked aid and medicine, they’ve allowed disease and famine to persist, but it also goes to point out yet another set of crimes and violation of human rights the genocidal apartheid state is guilty of that can be directly attributed to them demonstrably through established and proven scientific methodology.
It again goes to show why we cannot ever stop talking about what is going on in Gaza and indeed what Israel are now doing even further afield as they continue their assault on numerous fronts throughout the Middle East and must be held accountable for it. The case at the International Court of Justice is still ongoing by South Africa of course, joined as they have been in that by numerous other nations, notably just this week Ireland has now joined that action, making further mockery of every other state still bleating about Israel’s right to defend itself, shaming them and those who live in one of the nations, who’s government does not speak for them. Free Palestine.
Elsewhere in the Middle East however, no matter how much Israel might feel things are going their way, they look set on committing an act of gross stupidity in Syria that could hand a very big win to Iran as a result of which, something which is very much worth talking about, the last thing israel would possibly want and yet still they seem determined to bring down upon themselves anyway. Get the details of that karma in waiting story in this video recommendation here as your suggested next watch. Please do hit like, share and subscribe to help support the channel if you haven’t already done so, that is enormously appreciated and ensures you also don’t miss out on new daily content and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.