REPORTS ON GAZA DEATH TOLL GROWING MORE INACCURATE, ANALYSIS FINDS
Gazan fatality data shows a massive deterioration in the reports' accuracy, according to a recent analysis from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy published on Tuesday.
Since early November, the Hamas-controlled Gazan Health Ministry has been relying on media reports to supplement its own data collection systems.
The use of media reports for Gazan fatality data now sits at nearly two-thirds of deaths; this has been on the rise steadily since November and has made up the majority of data since at least late December.
The author of the analysis, Gabriel Epstein, explains that the media reports are difficult to trust as they are "more difficult to verify, regularly lack the details necessary to determine the identities or disposition of those killed, and may double-count or miss many fatalities."
Epstein highlights the discrepancies between the media reports and the central collection system (CCS) used by the Gazan Health Ministry. He shows that media reports disproportionately feature women and children, with 91.6% of the recorded deaths being women and children, whereas the CCS had that figure at 48.3% of deaths being women and children.
Epstein says some of the discrepancies can be explained by media reports being unlikely to record combatant deaths for a variety of reasons but that the recorded discrepancy is too large to be explained by this factor alone.
He also gives some leeway in the divergence from Israel's figure of 13,000 combatants killed due to many of the combatant deaths being unrecordable by non-IDF sources, for example, those killed in the tunnels.
A sharp decrease
The CCS shows a sharp decrease in fatalities since November, with only 286 recorded from March 1 to 18, compared to 5,192 from November 3 to December 11. There was also a prominent increase in the proportion of men recorded dead by the CCS, rising from 33.2% of deaths in October to 70.3% in March.
Epstein attributes this proportional increase to several factors, such as the "shift from a primarily air-based campaign to ground fighting, the mass evacuation of civilians from the north to Rafah governorate, and the decreasing intensity of fighting in areas where the central collection system is still functioning."
This reduces the total number of civilians killed and should lead to an increased concentration of male deaths in the figures, as adult men are the primary demographic of combatants.
Epstein gives several conclusions on how best to use the fatality data from Gaza while maintaining a skeptical view of them.
His first recommendation is to pair the use of the data in conjunction with scrutiny and with the appropriate caveats and to make clear the number of men killed is understated and the number of children killed is overstated.
Second, he dismisses the popular figure that 72% of those killed were women and children, instead saying that if media reports are excluded, the figure rests at 58%, and 48% following November 3. For the 72% figure to be accurate, women and children would have to make up about 90% of deaths recorded from media reports, which he called "implausible" as men comprise 25% of the population and should make up a higher percentage of deaths due to being combatants.
His final recommendation is that existing data is too limited to provide a definitive conclusion on the true death toll and the civilian-combatant ratio.
2024-03-29T02:02:01Z dg43tfdfdgfd