DAILY TRIFECTA: The War Over How Many People Are Dying In The War
Is Gaza an indiscriminate killing zone?
TITLE: Israeli Campaign against Gaza may Kill 186,000 or More — 8% of Population: The Lancet
https://www.juancole.com/2024/07/israeli-campaign-population.html
EXCERPT: One of the paper’s authors, Martin McKee, “is a member of the editorial board of the Israel Journal of Health Policy Research and of the International Advisory Committee of the Israel National Institute for Health Policy Research.” Although McKee says he is writing solely in a personal capacity, I think we may conclude that some members of the professional Israeli public health community have their hair on fire about the prosecution of the Gaza War.
The Gaza Ministry of Health now says that over 38,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israelis. As The Lancet notes, the World Health Organization and even the Israeli intelligence services accept these figures. Since the Israeli Air Force has dropped as many as five hundred two-thousand-pound bombs and by now has destroyed or damaged a majority of the buildings in the Gaza Strip, it is likely that at least 10,000 uncounted dead are under the rubble.
The 38,000 dead are the result of what is called direct gathering of the figures. Initially the dead were identified and reported by hospitals. As Israel has reduced the ability of hospitals to function by its attacks on them, this direct reporting has continued, but hospitals began being unable in some cases to send along identification, though they could confirm the reception of the corpses. Some dishonest observers suggested that this inability to know the names of the dead somehow made the numbers less reliable, but the World Health Organization refuted this allegation. The dead are in makeshift morgues still gradually being identified.
Indirect counting of the dead attempts to calculate the missing people using statistical methods. Sometimes public health experts have attempted to interview people to collect data on dead family members and friends, and then projected totals based on these surveys. That method is not available in Gaza, where the Israeli authorities will not permit journalists and other observers, and where it is dangerous to be because there are no real safe zones, with those regions declared safe zones often having been bombed.
Muhammad Jawad et al., in a survey of 118 unique armed conflicts affecting 102 countries from 1990 to 2017 found that they produced an average of 19.2 battle-related deaths per 100,000 population (54.7 for those in war as opposed to minor conflict). There were in addition an average of 311 excess deaths per 100,000 population from causes other than being immediately killed by a bomb or bullet. So, 16 civilians died of starvation, communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional diseases and injuries, for every direct death in combat.
And this seems important, in the Jawad et al. study: “Effect estimates were disproportionately larger for children aged under 5 years, regardless of the cause of death.” Gaza had some 350,000 children under 5. UNICEF reported in May, “9 out of 10 children under 5 in Gaza are suffering from one or more infectious diseases. Levels of acute watery diarrhea are 20 times higher than typical.” Already last March, 1 in 3 children under 2 were acutely malnourished, a condition that produces permanent cognitive and emotional damage.
The Lancet authors used a much smaller multiplier, of four indirect deaths for each direct death. Based on the death toll known when the paper was written, they arrived at 186,000 dead for this war over the coming months. They admit that the estimate of four indirect deaths for every direct one is conservative, so the number could be substantially greater.
TITLE: Has Israel really killed up to 186,000 people in Gaza? How to understand the numbers war
https://forward.com/opinion/631386/the-lancet-gaza-casualties-israel-war/
EXCERPT: An article in the revered medical journal The Lancet that declared “it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza” — a number far beyond the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry’s count of 37,396 dead.
That paper was quickly disseminated across social media as proof of a genocide conducted against Palestinians. But it has important shortcomings involving data that will be crucial to how we evaluate the true contours of this conflict.
First among those flaws: The authors of The Lancet‘s study made no effort to distinguish between civilian and military fatalities.
Their concern is with the idea of excess mortality: How many more people have died in Gaza in the last nine months than would have been expected to do so under ordinary circumstances, and how many more are likely to die? Under that banner, there is no distinction between combatants and noncombatants; every death is presumed to have equal moral weight.
Indirect deaths are difficult to calculate, and the reasons behind them are difficult to parse. Researchers must take into account conditions during and after conflict, which is almost impossible to do effectively while a war is ongoing. For instance, one study of indirect deaths as a result of the wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo found that the number one cause of death in the country was still malaria, despite years of ongoing armed conflict.
What this means: We can estimate how many more people have died in Gaza since October than normally would have in such a time span. However, we will not have clear data illustrating exactly why, and how such deaths were related to the war, for many years.
By failing to isolate civilian deaths from combatant ones, the Lancet authors fall into a trap set by Hamas, which does not distinguish between civilian and military fatalities in its own reported death toll, and has consistently refused to provide reporters with estimates of its military casualties. (In humanitarian law, this is a violation of the principle of distinction, which requires that militaries distinguish between civilians and combatants.) Estimates of those casualties have generally ranged from 6,000 to 12,000, numbers that reflect imprecise assessments of the operational impact of the war and the significant mixing of civilians and combatants in Gaza.
It should go without saying that a true calculation of the civilian toll of war must delineate between civilians and combatants as clearly as possible; to fail to do so is to further obscure already muddied waters. It can also hamper accountability. In more than a third of the cases considered by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, a United Nations war crimes court, officials were unable to identify the civilian or military status of the victims involved.
TITLE: ‘I’m bored, so I shoot’: The Israeli army’s approval of free-for-all violence in Gaza
https://www.972mag.com/israeli-soldiers-gaza-firing-regulations/
EXCERPTS: In early June, Al Jazeera aired a series of disturbing videos revealing what it described as “summary executions”: Israeli soldiers shooting dead several Palestinians walking near the coastal road in the Gaza Strip, on three separate occasions. In each case, the Palestinians appeared unarmed and did not pose any imminent threat to the soldiers.
Such footage is rare, due to the severe constraints faced by journalists in the besieged enclave and the constant danger to their lives. But these executions, which did not appear to have any security rationale, are consistent with the testimonies of six Israeli soldiers who spoke to +972 Magazine and Local Call following their release from active duty in Gaza in recent months. Corroborating the testimonies of Palestinian eyewitnesses and doctors throughout the war, the soldiers described being authorized to open fire on Palestinians virtually at will, including civilians.
The six sources — all except one of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity — recounted how Israeli soldiers routinely executed Palestinian civilians simply because they entered an area that the military defined as a “no-go zone.” The testimonies paint a picture of a landscape littered with civilian corpses, which are left to rot or be eaten by stray animals; the army only hides them from view ahead of the arrival of international aid convoys, so that “images of people in advanced stages of decay don’t come out.” Two of the soldiers also testified to a systematic policy of setting Palestinian homes on fire after occupying them.
Several sources described how the ability to shoot without restrictions gave soldiers a way to blow off steam or relieve the dullness of their daily routine. “People want to experience the event [fully],” S., a reservist who served in northern Gaza, recalled. “I personally fired a few bullets for no reason, into the sea or at the sidewalk or an abandoned building. They report it as ‘normal fire,’ which is a codename for ‘I’m bored, so I shoot.'”
Since the 1980s, the Israeli military has refused to disclose its open-fire regulations, despite various petitions to the High Court of Justice. According to political sociologist Yagil Levy, since the Second Intifada, “the army has not given soldiers written rules of engagement,” leaving much open to the interpretation of soldiers in the field and their commanders. As well as contributing to the killing of over 38,000 Palestinians, sources testified that these lax directives were also partly responsible for the high number of soldiers killed by friendly fire in recent months.
“There was total freedom of action,” said B., another soldier who served in the regular forces in Gaza for months, including in his battalion’s command center. “If there is [even] a feeling of threat, there is no need to explain — you just shoot.” When soldiers see someone approaching, “it is permissible to shoot at their center of mass [their body], not into the air,” B. continued. “It’s permissible to shoot everyone, a young girl, an old woman.”
Even in seemingly unpopulated or abandoned areas of Gaza, soldiers engaged in extensive shooting in a procedure known as “demonstrating presence.” S. testified that his fellow soldiers would “shoot a lot, even for no reason — anyone who wants to shoot, no matter what the reason, shoots.” In some cases, he noted, this was “intended to … remove people [from their hiding places] or to demonstrate presence.”
M., another reservist who served in the Gaza Strip, explained that such orders would come directly from the commanders of the company or battalion in the field. “When there are no [other] IDF forces [in the area] … the shooting is very unrestricted, like crazy. And not just small arms: machine guns, tanks, and mortars.”
Even in the absence of orders from above, M. testified that soldiers in the field regularly take the law into their own hands. “Regular soldiers, junior officers, battalion commanders — the junior ranks who want to shoot, they get permission.”
S. remembered hearing over the radio about a soldier stationed in a protective compound who shot a Palestinian family walking around nearby. “At first, they say ‘four people.’ It turns into two children plus two adults, and by the end it’s a man, a woman, and two children. You can assemble the picture yourself.”