In the US, counting the dead in Gaza has become a cruel political game – Mother Jones

Palestinians mourn their relatives who died at the Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah on July 1, 2024 as a result of Israeli bombings in the central Gaza Strip.Omar Ashtawy/APA Images/ZUMA

On July 5 The Lancet, one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals, published a letter from researchers with estimates of the death toll in Gaza from Israel’s nine-month invasion.

Researchers Dr. Rasha Khatib, Dr. Martin McKee and Dr. Salim Yusuf considered a possible ratio of four indirect deaths to every direct death and wrote: “It is not implausible to estimate that as many as 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributed to the current conflict in Gaza.” That is almost five times the 38,000 deaths reported by the Gaza Health Ministry, the only organization that regularly counts the dead on the ground. That figure represents 8 percent of Gaza’s population.

Now researchers are making a statement that is hard to digest: the shocking death toll that is reported daily as a result of the Israeli Gaza war may still be far too low.

It is not possible to determine the exact number of deaths until the conflict ends, but as the conflict continues, the estimates used have political implications. Debates about the death toll revolve around debates about US aid, debates about South Africa’s claim that Israel is committing genocide, and arguments about how humanitarian aid should reach the Palestinians.

The Health Ministry has been criticized by American experts and politicians for inflating the death toll to meet Hamas’ political goals. President Joe Biden, just three weeks into the war, said he had no confidence in “the numbers the Palestinians are using” to calculate their death toll. On June 27, the United States House of Representatives passed an amendment barring the State Department from using the ministry’s death statistics because of its ties to Hamas. The ministry, like every other part of the Gaza government, is under the rule of the territory’s ruling party. But the group’s death toll has been repeatedly deemed reliable by outside researchers, as well as the World Health Organization and the United Nations.

Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan), the only Palestinian-American member of Congress, voted against the amendment. “There is so much anti-Palestinian racism in this room that my colleagues don’t even want to acknowledge that Palestinians exist – not while they’re alive, not even when they’re dead,” Tlaib said on the House floor. “This is genocide denial.”

The authors of The lancet The letter’s authors are not the only scientists who believe the ministry’s numbers may be grossly understated. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Center for Humanitarian Health and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine produced a report earlier this year projecting the direct and indirect deaths likely to occur in Gaza between February and August 2024. Their data suggests there will be tens of thousands of indirect deaths beyond the Health Ministry’s figures.

On February 19, when the first Gaza projection report was released, the Gaza Health Ministry said that about 29,000 Palestinians had been killed in the war. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University predicted at the time that, unless there was a ceasefire, between 58,269 and 74,290 more people would die in Gaza by the second week of August (depending on factors such as the level of military escalation and possible epidemics).

Even if a ceasefire had been reached, at least 6,000 more people would likely have died from malnutrition, disease and other preventable causes, according to the Gaza Projections report, partly because Gaza’s health system has now been almost completely destroyed.

The figures in the Gaza projections, like the estimates in the Lancet, are at least twice as high as the figures published by the Ministry of Health.

“It is necessary to document the extent and nature of the suffering in this conflict,” The authors of the Lancet letter said: “Documenting the true scale is crucial to ensure historical accountability and to acknowledge the full cost of the war.”