Explosive new scientific report on Gaza exposes some horrifying truths

Right, so with the genocide in Gaza still very much continuing, with more forced displacements and Israeli forces having most recently been attacking not just Rafah in the south, but also Gaza City again in the north and Khan Younis in between, it is of no surprise we are still seeing, though admittedly it’s getting harder to find in our media, the death toll in Gaza still rising. More and more we’re finding ourselves reliant on foreign media to keep up to date with matters, fortunately available online and in often in English making this a none too difficult task if like me you access most of your news online.
But one outlet I wasn’t expecting an intervention from is the very much western based oldest medical journal in the world weighing in on the matter of the Gaza death toll, for the Lancet, highly esteemed, peer reviewed scientific publication that it is, has by it’s own assessment determined that the actual death toll in Gaza could be some 4 times higher than the Gaza health ministry are actually reporting.
Right, so Gaza. The official death toll of Palestinians in Gaza, mainly women and children has now passed 38,000, but according to the highly regarded Lancet, that might be a hefty underestimation. The 38,000 figure is derived from people who have been killed since October 7th by Israeli forces but if you think about it, that figure can only be arrived at in an official capacity, if they’ve actual bodies to identify and the difficulty for the Gaza Health Ministry is that Gazan infrastructure they rely on to collate such figures has been destroyed, it’s become a much harder exercise to maintain figures, to collect data. Where normally the health ministry can rely on hospitals, deaths occurring as they do in hospitals, or people brought in dead, they have now had to augment their data collection sources to include first responders and the media, who may not be as reliable, it has to be considered a degradation in the quality of the data collected. These sources have , just like hospitals, in the course of Israeli atrocity all been targeted as well and that chain of information has continued to be disrupted and as a consequence of all of this, the Health Ministry has been separating those identified from hospital sources, from those bodies it has not been able to identify via other sources since last May and of those declared numbers of deaths, some 30% of them, remain unidentified.
That data collection issue is just one aspect of this Lancet report that estimates the true death toll in Gaza could be as high as 186,000 people.
So even with data collection difficulties, how can the official numbers be so far short of this Lancet estimate?
Well without a proper ceasefire to be able to check these and search for more bodies, the numbers aren’t likely to move towards each other any time soon, but the Lancet does point out where further unidentified bodies are likely to be and actually when you think about all of this it does unfortunately become quite a logical conclusion, as you’d expect from a scientific and peer reviewed publication. The Lancet simply doesn’t publish stuff without sourcing and evidencing its conclusions and having them corroborated.
For one 35% of all buildings in the Gaza Strip have been reduced to rubble. Logically, there will be people who will have buried in those buildings.
The Lancet referred to another organisation when it came to asking questions about these, they turned to Airwars, a non profit transparency watchdog that tracks, assesses and investigates civilian casualties in conflict zones in order to reliably and independently more importantly, track document the human cost of war. The Gaza Strip has been no different in that regard and they have found that not all the names of those identified by the Gaza Health Ministry end up included in the Ministry’s list. Now the Gaza Health Ministry has always had it’s figures held in high regard, the quality and accuracy of it’s figures previously, the UN cite their accuracy as a for instance, as does the World Health organisation, though Israel as you might have guessed do not, so this again is a source of data inaccuracy and actually shows how badly the Gaza Health Ministry’s ability to collect data on fatalities has become as more and more of the Strip gets razed to the ground. The figure of 10,000 people potentially being buried in the rubble are figures quoted in the Lancet article come from the UN Office for the Co-Ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the OCHA, who’s last estimate on this came in May and who also said it could take up to three years to find them all using the equipment people in Gaza have on hand now, decimated as Gaza has been.
That of course is assuming the fighting ends now. Another factor is that even when the fighting does end, there will be so many indirect deaths and will continue to be in the coming months and years, as a result of disease, and this will arguably be the biggest killer of all. Medical supplies interrupted, horrendous life changing injury, food supplies interrupted, the ability to make a living, grow food at its most basic, lack of water, lack of power, lack of shelter, the knock on effects are devastating and we actually hear so little about this.
But taking the Gaza Health Ministry figures and attributing a ratio of 4 indirect deaths to every direct death in Gaza to arrive at their estimate and this ratio again is based on a UN study from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime titled the ‘Global Burden of Armed Conflict’ a 310 page study if you care to go through the whole thing, this is not an unreasonable guide on such matters and that brings matters up to that 186,000 figure, which would account for roughly 8% of the entire Gazan population.
It should be noted by way of a caveat, and not one erring on the side of caution here, the Lancet believes even that might be a conservative figure, that an Action On Armed Violence commissioned study from February calculated that without a ceasefire, with the death toll at that point being some 28,000 people, there would be an eventual death toll of some 58,000 people due to those indirect factors and that was assuming there would be no health epidemic or escalation in violence. Where that were to happen, the estimation for fatalities rose to more than 85,000. We are now in July and matters are not abating.
So what of the response to these findings?
Well some people have been pointing out an article by left wing outlet +972 magazine, entitled ‘I’m bored, so I shoot: The Israeli army’s approval of free for all violence in Gaza’ and with the tagline:
‘Israeli soldiers describe the near-total absence of firing regulations in the Gaza war, with troops shooting as they please, setting homes ablaze, and leaving corpses on the streets – all with their commanders permission.’
And its impossible not to conclude after 10 months that this is not encouraged by the Israeli government and those within it? Labour MP Zarah Sultana tweeted out about this Lancet article today as well saying:
‘The Lancet - the most prestigious medical journal in the world - conservatively estimates that the death toll in Gaza could be 186,000 or more. That’s 8% of the population. I repeat my longstanding call for the UK government to immediately end all arms sales to Israel.’
She’s not wrong, but you can guess what she’s being called for calling this out though can’t you? An antisemite spreading fake news. The Lancet, of all publications, fake news? You’re going to have to do better than that.
Investigative journalist Asa Winstanley of Electronic Intifada has also passed comment on the Lancet’s figures, saying:
‘I’m still reeling from the fact that The Lancet has now estimated that the real death toll in Gaza is 186,000. It’s not unexpected given the reality on the ground of Israel’s genocide, but no less horrifying for it.’
But are any western mainstream media outlets reporting this? Nope. I did as I often do when researching a story type in a basic search term into google and see what publications it throws up and in response to Lancet Gaza Deaths, to see what other publications have said about the article itself, which I’ve also read I should add, there’s nothing. The Jewish Chronicle are rubbishing it, because of course they are, but the main sources after that include the likes of Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, 5Pillars, the Palestine Chronicle, you get the idea.
The fact of the matter is, as awful as it is to think of these lives lost in terms of just raw statistics, even they are an underestimate and we aren’t being told about it, except in foreign and independent media, and that continues to be absolutely scandalous.
And in amidst all of this the UK government, albeit the one that has just departed, but to my knowledge Starmer has quashed it, has instructed lawyers to block the International Criminal Court Chief Prosecutor’s case against Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister Yoav Gallant, from issuing arrest warrants for them. Starmer cancelled the Rwanda scheme fast enough, why not this? Find out all about this story in this video recommendation and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.