Lancet: Death toll from Israel's Gaza assault could exceed 186,000

The medical journal The Lancet published an article stating that In the Gaza Strip, 168,000 people died as a result of the war, not 37,000. The reason for such a significant discrepancy is that most of the dead buried under rubble, which no one has ever figured out.

The latest report from Hamas' Health Ministry puts the official death toll at nearly 38,200. However, a recent report in The Lancet, titled “Gaza's Death Count: Difficult But Necessary”suggests that this figure is much higher.

The true figure likely includes thousands more people trapped under the rubble and those who died from the effects of war, such as malnutrition, disease and lack of medical care. The widespread death toll was contributed to by 14,000 bombs that the US provided to Israel.

These bombs not only caused direct casualties, but also destroyed Gaza's infrastructure, worsening the situation and causing further deaths. The destruction of medical facilities, food distribution networks and sanitation systems left the population in a dangerous situation. The Lancet highlights the difficulty of collecting accurate data due to widespread destruction:

“The number of registered deaths is likely much higher. The NGO Airwars receives detailed assessments of incidents in the Gaza Strip and often finds that not all names of identifiable victims are included on the ministry's list.

In addition, according to UN estimates: To On February 29, 2024, 35% of buildings in the Gaza Strip were destroyed, so the number of bodies still buried under the rubble is likely to be significant – estimated at over 10,000 – the report says. – The overall death toll is expected to be high given the intensity of the war, the devastated health infrastructure, the severe shortages of food, water and shelter, the inability of the population to flee to safety, and the cessation of funding for UNRWA, one of the few humanitarian organizations still operating in the Gaza Strip.”

“The ministry has had to supplement its usual reports, based on people who died in its hospitals or were brought in dead, with information from reliable media sources and emergency services. The Gaza Health Ministry has begun separately reporting the number of unidentified bodies among the total number of fatalities. As of May 10, 2024, 30% of the 35,091 deaths remained unidentified. The number of deaths reported is clearly an undercount. Airwars, an NGO that monitors and archives airstrikes in the Middle East, found that the names of some identified airstrikes victims were not included in the ministry's lists,” the article says.

“In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths have been three to fifteen times higher than direct deaths. Using a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths for every direct death out of 37,396 reported, this suggests that up to 186,000 or more deaths could be linked to the current conflict in Gaza. Using the 2022 Gaza population estimate of 2,375,259, this would represent 7-9% of the total population. The February 7, 2024, report, when the death toll was 28,000, estimated that without a ceasefire, the death toll by August 6, 2024 would be between 58,260 (without an outbreak or escalation) and 85,750 (if both occurred),” – the authors of the material emphasize.

In the nine months of the Israeli war that began after deadly attacks Hamas October 7 in southern Israel, huge areas of the Gaza Strip were razed to the ground and turned into ruins, and the Palestinian enclave itself is under siege and experiencing an acute shortage of food, drinking water and medicine.

The unique IDF Caterpillar D9R bulldozer, nicknamed the “teddy bear,” is in service with the Israeli army and is used to resolve conflicts with the Palestinians. The heavy armored tracked vehicle is used to demolish buildings in which armed people have taken up residence.

It is also a proven fact that Israel, using armored bulldozers and explosives, is razing entire neighborhoods of Gaza to the ground, leaving no way to identify the bodies of the dead that may have remained in the rubble.

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