“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.
They’ve been on that mission for nearly 70 years.
More than 75 years actually.
I can’t find the article (I forget the name of the incident), but the Jewish genocide of Palestinians predates the nation of Israel by at least a few years.
Anti-zionism keeps on truckin though.
I mean… Yes?
The bigger the genocide, the bigger the “anti” becomes. It’s not a mystery.
I wonder if that number can get so large it reverses. This attitude continues long enough we might find out.
Only if the ones being killed are sworn enemies would there be a positive sentiment but that isn’t the case. At best the atrocities are not mentioned If there is a big advantage in trade, economics or military advantage. In this case it’s the military advantage for the USA that’s the key. If not they’d be known as genocidal maniacs until the current leader dies and memories fade after a few decades.
Yes… for reasons.
You know those headlines about some scientific study that was incredibly obvious? Like “Rich people live longer due to access to better healthcare”. I feel like this is one of those.
In this case it is absolutely crucial, as one of the repeated arguments made by the genocide supporters is “its just war, they try to prevent civillian deaths” or “if it was genocide they would have killed much more people”
These are lies. They are absolutely deliberate in what they do, and the realistic numbers prove that. The numbers of people officially recognised as dead has been rising only slowly since april/may. This is not because the killing and devastation have become less, they got worse. It is because the health system has collapsed after Israel made a point of destroying it.
Oh yeah, don’t get me wrong, I get why it needs to be said. It’s just sad that it does, you know? That we live in a world where something like this happens, and people are just so numb and apathetic to it.
Well, yes, that was the goal from the very beginning. Pol Pot would be so proud of Nethayaho.
Don’t worry though, they pinky promised that there’s no genocide happening.
There is no genocide untill every last one of them is dead.
/s
And when they are - it’s nothing to worry about since they’re not here anymore.
/s
New holocaust. Fucking nazis, they never change.
No shit people…that’s what genocide is… haven’t we been paying attention.
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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?
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Discrediting death tolls is a type of genocide denial, there are certainly much more dead than has not been accounted for yet, due to the ongoing genocide. The methodology used to determine the conservative estimate of 1:4 direct to indirect deaths is cited and is an extensive document. Very weird to simply discredit it and claim “no methodology” for either the Gaza Health Ministry or The Lancet publication. Their analysis of total deaths, including direct and indirect deaths, is certainly an underestimation.
By June 19, 2024, 37,396 people had been killed in the Gaza Strip since the attack by Hamas and the Israeli invasion in October, 2023, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, as reported by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. The Ministry’s figures have been contested by the Israeli authorities, although they have been accepted as accurate by Israeli intelligence services, the UN, and WHO. These data are supported by independent analyses, comparing changes in the number of deaths of UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) staff with those reported by the Ministry, which found claims of data fabrication implausible.
In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths. Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death9 to the 37 396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza. Using the 2022 Gaza Strip population estimate of 2 375 259, this would translate to 7·9% of the total population in the Gaza Strip. A report from Feb 7, 2024, at the time when the direct death toll was 28 000, estimated that without a ceasefire there would be between 58 260 deaths (without an epidemic or escalation) and 85 750 deaths (if both occurred) by Aug 6, 2024
Did you even read my post before responding to it? It’s hard to have a discussion when all you do is regurgitate delusional Hasbara talking points.
All death tolls require a level of trust. We should not trust Hamas numbers blindly. But we can look at their history- Hamas have been releasing death counts from conflicts since at least 2008. After those conflicts subsided, the UN inspectors came in to question and confirm the Hamas numbers.
Hamas has literally received the gold-standard approval from the UN, time and time again, for the methodology and accuracy of their death counts.
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.
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.
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.
