Nature of 27 June reported on an independent survey that interviewed 2000 households in the Gaza strip, except in the most dangerous areas, in December 2024. As noted by Patrick Ball, director of research at Human Rights Data Analysis Group (who took part in Datascience for Good at CIRM), it is amazing a proper survey could be conducted in such dramatic conditions, with consistent findings given an earlier study using capture-recapture published in The Lancet, and exceeds the official figures published by the Ministry of Health in Gaza. In part because they included non-violent deaths since October 2023. As stressed by the authors, assessing the magnitude of the death numbers (4% of the Gaza population) and of the unique proportion of non-combatant deaths (over 60%) in a modern conflict, but numbers do not replace a
“…project of memorialization [that] has only begun and must continue for many years after the war ends. Estimates of numbers killed, the focus of the present paper, can help guide this casualty recording work. But we cannot provide each human being due recognition in death simply by estimating the number of deaths.”
