The death toll from Israel’s war on Gaza could be as high as 186,000, medical experts have concluded, a figure 150,000 higher than current estimates.
The analysis by the medical journal The Lancet could give a deeper understanding of the devastation reaped in Gaza, where 2.2 million Palestinians live, in what aid groups say was a “heartbreaking and harrowing, but not necessarily surprising” new figure.
Authors of the article Rasha Khatib, Martin McKee and Salim Yusuf estimated this figure by taking the number of direct deaths reported by Gaza’s health authorities at the time, 37,396 people, and applying an estimate of four indirect deaths to every one direct death, a calculation that comes from the ‘Global Burden of Armed Violence’ report by the Geneva Declaration.
This was published in 2008 where several conflicts were analysed to attain the estimate that for every one direct death in the wars analysed in the report, four people were killed indirectly due to the “worsening of social, economic, and health conditions in conflict-affected areas”.
Gaza’s health ministry’s most recent update on the casualty figure of Israel’s war on Gaza puts the number of killed at 38,193, with a further 87,903 wounded. …more
