Understanding the Lancet’s flawed study on Gaza casualties – The Forward

On July 9, people injured in Israeli bombings arrive at Nassr Hospital in Khan Yunis. Photo by Bashar TALEB / AFP / Getty Images

The political dispute over the number of civilian deaths in Gaza makes it harder, rather than easier, for us to actually understand how many civilians have been harmed in the past. nine months of warand in what way.

Anyone who studies civilian casualties, as I do, knows that these numbers are only one measure of the true human cost of a conflict. They cannot, on their own, provide the full picture. By putting political goals ahead of scientific ones – such as trying to prove that Israel is committing genocide – the combatants in this war of words are hampering the process that normally leads to reasonable estimates of civilian damage.

Often the discrepancies between the results of these processes and the original estimates are glaring. It was originally estimated that around 200,000 people were killed during the Bosnian War from 1992 to 1995. Three decades later, the officially accepted figure is less than the half this number. The death toll in connection with the Congo wars was initially estimated by a humanitarian NGO at 5.4 million. However, a scientific review concluded that a thorough study was only half of this number of deaths. In the latter case, the scientists ultimately concluded that the numbers had been inflated for donation reasons.

And yet, rather than learning the importance of being cautious and precise in estimating casualty numbers, academics and activists on both sides of the Israel-Hamas war are resorting to findings that are obviously flawed. The ambiguity inherent in much of international humanitarian law creates a political incentive for those who advocate prosecuting Israel to estimate the number of civilian casualties as high as possible. And it puts pressure on those who defend Israel’s war against Hamas to keep the number of civilian casualties as low as possible, both in practice and in the press.

The latest example of headlines in this conflict: A Article in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet It said: “It is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths may be due to the current conflict in the Gaza Strip” – a figure that far exceeds the 37,396 deaths reported by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry.

This document was quickly circulated on social media as evidence of genocide committed against the Palestinians, but it has significant deficiencies in terms of data that will be crucial to assessing the true contours of this conflict.

The first of these shortcomings: The authors of The LancetNo attempt was made in the study to distinguish between civilian and military fatalities.

They are concerned about excess mortality: how many people have died in Gaza in the last nine months than would have been expected under normal circumstances, and how many more are likely to die? In this sense, there is no distinction between combatants and non-combatants; every death has the same moral weight.

Indirect deaths are difficult to calculate and the reasons for them are difficult to analyze. Researchers must take into account the conditions during and after a conflict, which is almost impossible during an ongoing war. For example: a study on indirect deaths As a result of the wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo, it became clear that malaria is still the leading cause of death in the country, despite years of armed conflict.

This means that we can estimate how many people have died in Gaza since October than would normally be the case in such a period. However, it will not be for many years before we have clear data that proves exactly why these deaths occurred and how they are related to the war.

Since it has not been possible to separate civilian deaths from deaths among combatants, lancet The authors fall into a trap set by Hamas, which does not distinguish between civilian and military casualties in its own death toll figures and consistently refuses to provide reporters with estimates of its military losses. (In international humanitarian law, this is a violation of the Principle of distinctionwhich requires the military to distinguish between civilians and combatants.) Estimates of these casualties generally ranged from 6,000 to 12,000Figures that reflect inaccurate assessments of the operational impact of the war and the significant mixing of civilians and combatants in the Gaza Strip.

It should go without saying that a true calculation of the civilian casualties of a war must distinguish as clearly as possible between civilians and combatants. Failure to do so would further muddy already murky waters. It could also complicate accountability. more than a third of the cases The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, a United Nations war crimes tribunal, looked into the case, but officials were unable to determine the civilian or military status of the victims.

Also worrying: The lancetThe study finds that 30 percent of reported deaths in the Gaza Strip cannot be identified, but does not address what percentage of reported deaths were unverified.

The inclusion of unconfirmed deaths is particularly important as the Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza increasingly relies on “information from reliable media sources and first responders,” as well as self-reports from relatives and reports from the Gaza government’s media office. What constitutes a reliable media source as opposed to an unreliable source or even a clearly politicized source is not discussed. The United Nations itself accepted in December 2023 that the methodology used by the Gaza Government Media Office to report deaths was “unknown.”

I’m not saying these numbers are wrong – just that it’s a mistake to assume they’re right without independent verification. Groups that produce casualty figures can have competing interests. It can take years to determine the true human toll of a war, including by examining long-term health consequences such as nutrition, fertility and mental health. By burning numbers that aren’t determined through rigorous, well-understood processes into our collective consciousness, those behind studies like these can get to the truth about casualty numbers. The LancetThis will make it difficult for the public to accept the long-term results of this research, whatever they may be.

There are numerous examples of how this has worked in the past, including the one on October 7. Initial estimates suggested that around 1,500 people had been killed in the Hamas attack; later, estimates were revised downwards, ending up with a figure just under 1,200. But the 1,500 figure is still circulating on social media: people remember the first reports they see better than later, more factual ones.

The pursuit of precision—including by openly admitting how much we still don’t know—is especially important in cases like this war, where allegations of genocide are at stake. Genocide, as defined in international law, depends on two important requirements: intent and the destruction of a group in whole or in part. Aside from the difficulties of establishing intent, what “in part” means has never been defined. Is it two percent of a group’s population—say, the percentage of Palestinians in Gaza, including civilians and fighters, killed in this war? If the threshold is higher, by how much and why?

The predicted death toll in Gaza The Lancet is a matter of modelling, not of concrete facts. In making their prediction, the researchers assumed that there would be four indirect deaths for every direct death in Gaza. They assumed that the war in Gaza would ultimately be deadlier than the recent wars in Yemen (which, according to the UN, had a ratio of 1.3 indirect deaths to 1 direct death) or Ethiopia (a ratio of 2 to 1 at most). They may have good reasons for this assumption, but they remain unclear at present.

Thousands of civilians have died in Gaza. What is certain is that many more civilians have died than combatants. But those who use these figures for political purposes fail to recognize that it will take years to obtain reliable and widely accepted figures, if the current politicization of estimates is ever overcome. The Bosnian Book of the Dead, a database of 96,985 war-related deaths from the 1992-1995 war, was not completed until July 2006, more than a decade after the war ended. The expectation that a hard and fast death toll in the Israel-Hamas war can be established in real time is both unrealistic and misleading.

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