New Delhi: While Gaza’s health ministry estimated that around 37,000 people were killed as of last month in the Palestinian territory ever since the Israel-Hamas war broke out, the real death toll could eventually be as high as 186,000, an article in the Lancet medical journal has argued.
The article’s authors said that while some have doubted the accuracy of the health ministry’s data, the scale of the conflict means bodies may be still be buried under rubble – and thus not counted – and indirect deaths from causes such as disease are likely to have occurred.
“Collecting data is becoming increasingly difficult for the Gaza health ministry due to the destruction of much of the infrastructure,” authors Rasha Khatib, Martin McKee and Salim Yusuf said, adding that as a result it has come to rely on information from the media or first responders to augment figures it collects from hospitals.
“Consequently, the Gaza health ministry now reports separately the number of unidentified bodies among the total death toll,” they also said, noting that unidentified bodies accounted for 30% of the roughly 35,000 deaths as of May.
But despite attempts by some to “undermine the veracity of the data”, the authors said the ministry’s figures were “likely an underestimate”.
They attributed this to findings that the ministry has not named all identifiable victims in its list of casualties and that UN estimates indicated over 10,000 people were buried under the rubble in Gaza where, according to damage assessments, 35% of all buildings have been destroyed.
Additionally, indirect deaths caused by diseases – communicable or otherwise – spread during the war means the toll will increase in the years to come, they noted.
“The total death toll is expected to be large given the intensity of this conflict; destroyed health-care infrastructure; severe shortages of food, water, and shelter; the population’s inability to flee to safe places; and the loss of funding to UNRWA, one of the very few humanitarian organisations still active in the Gaza strip,” Khatib, McKee and Yusuf wrote.
They arrived at their estimate of 186,000 dead by applying a “conservative” estimate that there were four indirect deaths for each direct death from the conflict – indirect deaths have numbered between three and 15 times the number of direct ones in recent conflicts, they said.
Their piece in The Lancet is a correspondence article, which according to the journal are letters from readers and are “not normally externally peer reviewed”.
Gaza’s health ministry most recent estimates say the Israel-Hamas war has killed over 38,200 people in the territory, AP reported.
The conflict began after Hamas, the Palestinian organisation that governs Gaza, launched a terrorist attack in Israel in October that killed about 1,200 people. Israel then launched an offensive into Gaza with the aim of destroying Hamas.
Its offensive, which is ongoing, has been criticised for killing many civilians, a majority of them women and children.
In May, the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor applied for arrest warrants against Israel’s prime minister and defence minister, as well as against three Hamas leaders, saying he believed they had committed war crimes during the conflict.
