We generally accept that if you do a census and only count the people who answer their doors you miss some people, and that you can calculate an estimate that reliably gets closer to reality than the list of people who answer their doors. Of course it will get closer, the more information you can gather. But those insisting that people who do not answer their doors be treated as not existing are widely understood, not as principled fact checkers, but as having ulterior reasons for desiring undercounts.
DIRECT AND IDENTIFIED
The fact is not really disputed that in every war there are people who die without being identified at a morgue. They may die from direct war violence or from starvation or disease resulting from a war’s destruction of hospitals. They may be blown into little pieces, be buried under buildings, drown in the sea, or die hours after being born. There’s no certain way to know the exact proportion between identified and unidentified deaths in a given war. But even in a dense, relatively educated place and even with the growth of social media, a zone in which hospitals, media outlets, power plants, and — in fact — every type of building, have been reduced to rubble is unlikely to set the record for the lowest percentage of unidentified deaths — much less eliminate them altogether.
RUBBLE
In fact, the same government in Gaza that provides the figure always cited in Western media for Palestinian deaths in Gaza (direct deaths from violence) — currently 41,909 — also says, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, that it estimates there are another 10,000 buried under rubble. In other words, the 41,909 are reported as bodies that have been counted, and a large majority of them identified with names (an independent study suggests the reliability of the identified names), but another 10,000 or so bodies are missing and have not been found. The 10,000 may be a very rough estimate, also known as a wild guess. But it’s very likely closer to the truth than is zero. Reporting an estimate of 51,909 would almost certainly be closer to the truth than reporting 41,909. And the very same source you’re citing for 41,909 would tell you that.
STARVATION AND DISEASE
Seven months ago, Ralph Nader suggested that the complete death count might be much higher than 51,909, that it did not make sense to be relying only on reports from hospitals when the hospitals were being bombed, or to only be counting deaths directly caused by war violence.
Two and a half months ago, an article in the Lancet suggested that a “conservative” count of all direct and indirect deaths in Gaza might be had by multiplying the official count by 5, thereby counting 4 unidentified and indirect deaths from starvation, disease, etc., for every 1 death by violence identified at a hospital morgue. Multiplying 41,909 by 5 would give us 209,545.
Five days ago, a long list of U.S. medical professionals who have worked in Gaza wrote a letter to U.S. President Joe Biden arguing that the official numbers are low. “As long as aid agencies and public health experts are denied entry to Gaza the true numbers cannot be known,” the authors wrote. But, “[t]he Gaza Health Ministry only reports deaths caused directly by violence that arrive at a hospital morgue. . . . [T]hese are typically the smallest number of deaths in a large-scale protracted conflict. Hunger in Gaza is not being caused by the unavoidable societal disruption that accompanies war. Israel is deliberately starving the Palestinians of Gaza. . . . With the known violent deaths, the estimated ten thousand people buried under the rubble and certainly dead, a conservative estimate of 62,413 deaths from malnutrition and disease, and a conservative estimate of 5,000 deaths in patients with chronic diseases, we estimate that the current death toll is at least 118,908. . . . These are the most conservative estimates of the death toll that can be made with the given available data as of September 30, 2024. It is highly likely that the real number of deaths in Gaza from this conflict is far higher than this most conservative estimate.”
Today the Costs of War Project collected various official reports as follows (this is just for the past 365 days, of course; not the past 76 years):
Israeli Fatalities in Israel: 1,200
Israeli Fatalities in Gaza: 346
Israeli Fatalities in West Bank 33
Palestinian Fatalities in Gaza 41,615
Palestinian Fatalities in West Bank 693
Palestinians Missing/Estimated Dead Under the Rubble 10,000
Total > 53,887
And the estimate from above as follows:
Estimated Deaths from Starvation: 62,413
Estimated Deaths from Lack of Access to Care for Chronic Diseases: 5,000
Estimated Deaths from Infectious Diseases, Maternal/Neonatal Deaths, and Others: ?
Total > 67,413
It’s not clear why Costs of War says the 62,413 that was for “malnutrition and disease” is for only “starvation”.
The total of 53,887 direct and 67,413 indirect deaths is an estimate of 121,300. But that includes the West Bank and Israelis.
So, for estimates of total deaths thus far caused by war in Gaza, we have a wild guess of 209,000 and a more careful estimate of 118,000. These are guesses. And I’m guessing that they are not ever going to be verified through a study based on going door-to-door. The doors are gone, along with the walls, floors, windows, and roofs. These estimates may be refined as information is gathered from survivors, assuming there are survivors. But they will always be rough estimates.
And yet, these rough estimates, not the official total that leaves out lost bodies, starvation, and disease entirely, are the very best we’ve got, and ought to be what we’re discussing. So, I am going to discuss the war on Gaza as though 118,908 Palestinian people (and aid workers and journalists etc.) have been killed there, plus 1,546 Israelis.
WORST WAR EVER?
While it’s nearly universal practice, even among peace activists, to stick with the lowest death count (41,909 at the moment), it is also nearly universal practice to call the war on Gaza the worst war ever, dramatically worse in fact than other wars, so much worse as to be a different phenomenon entirely. But if that’s the death count, then as an absolute number it’s much smaller than the death counts of other recent wars. And it’s not record-setting even as a proportion of the small population involved (it’s less than 2 percent of 2.1 million Gazans).
If, on the other hand, 118,908 is the death count, then it’s still not a large number as war deaths go, but it is over 5.5 percent of the population of Gaza. When you combine that with the openly genocidal rhetoric, which is indeed dramatically worse than the rhetoric accompanying most wars, plus the thoroughgoing destruction of infrastructure, plus the record-setting murders of journalists and aid workers and UN staff, plus the record-setting percentage of the population made homeless, etc., you start to get a picture of one of the worst wars, at least by certain measures.
Iraq may have lost 1.4 million lives just in the war that began in 2003, which was 5 percent of the population. That compares to the United States losing 2.5 percent of its population in the U.S. Civil War, or Japan losing 3 to 4 percent in World War II, while the UK lost less than 1 percent and the U.S. 0.3% in that same war. So the Iraq war was far more deadly in absolute numbers. But it killed a slightly smaller percentage of the population (thus far, as the war on Gaza keeps going), and more of the country survived the destruction (already, as the war on Gaza keeps going).
Meanwhile, U.S. deaths in the war on Iraq were 0.3 percent of the dead. That compares to Israeli deaths, currently at 1.3 percent of the deaths in the past year in Gaza/Israel. So, the Iraq war was more one-sided (though both have been extremnely one-sided).
Worst war ever? Depends how you look at it. But you have to start with a serious look at the death count.