“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.
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.