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A recent study published in the Lancet Medical Magazine indicates that the number of Palestinian martyrs in the Israeli war may be much higher than the official outcome announced by the Ministry of Health in Gaza.
Until May 5, the Ministry of Health reported that 52,615 people were martyred as a result of Israeli military operations in the Gaza Strip.
Although the accurate daily census of the dead is unusual in armed conflicts, and there is no equal to it even in major wars such as war in Ukraine, the Gaza authorities have continued to issue detailed statements about the numbers of Palestinian martyrs.
The study says that although there are doubts about the accuracy of these numbers, given the possibility of political motives to amplify the losses of civilians, previous experiences indicate that the United Nations and Israel estimates after the end of the wars were often identical to the estimates that were conducted during the war.
According to the Israeli novel, the Ministry of Health in Gaza does not distinguish between civilians and resistance elements in its statistics for the number of martyrs. In January, the Israeli authorities estimated that about 20,000 martyrs were from the Palestinian resistance.
The list of martyrs
The Ministry of Health relies on two main lists to collect the numbers of martyrs: the first is based on hospital data, and the second on online questionnaires in which families report the loss of their relatives, in addition to data for people who were martyred without knowing their identity.
But the researchers used a different approach, as they compared 3 databases to the names of the martyrs and their ages, and sometimes their identities numbers: two from the Ministry of Health, and the third prepared by the researchers using the records of martyrs published on social media that included only the people who were martyred after physical injuries.
By analyzing the overlap between these lists until June 30, 2024, the researchers concluded that the actual number of martyrs may exceed official numbers by 46% and 107%.
If this range is applied to the latest outcome, the number of martyrs may range between 77 thousand and 109 thousand martyrs, equivalent to about 5% of the population of Gaza before the war.
The researchers acknowledge that there is a great deal of uncertainty in these estimates, as they found that 3952 people were included in one of the official lists and then deleted later.
It is also possible that the martyrs of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) are not adequately representing in official data, either as a result of a political decision to reduce the estimates of losses or the difficulty of their documentation, as they put it. Consequently, the number of martyrs may be higher than the lists.
In addition, there are unknown numbers, perhaps thousands, for people who were martyred as a result of indirect reasons, such as failure of medical care after the collapse of the health system in the sector, which is difficult to measure now.
This war, which is the longest and bloody in the history of the Palestinian issue, destroyed many institutions that document human losses, such as hospitals, which makes any final census accurately what happened is a far -fetched issue.
Since October 7, 2023, Israel has launched a genocide war on the Gaza Strip, including killing, destruction, starvation and forced displacement, ignoring international calls and the orders of the International Court of Justice to stop them.
