New survey says Gaza Ministry of Health undercounts deaths by some 40%. It has MANY methodological problems. ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Sunday, June 29, 2025

New survey says Gaza Ministry of Health undercounts deaths by some 40%. It has MANY methodological problems.

Prof. Michael Spagat, an economist at Holloway College at the University of London, is a world-class expert on mortality in violent conflicts. He's written dozens of articles on the wars in Iraq, Syria and Kosovo, among others. This week he and a team of researchers published the most comprehensive study to date on the subject of mortality in the Gaza Strip.

With the aid of Palestinian political scientist Dr. Khalil Shikaki, the team surveyed 2,000 households in Gaza, comprising almost 10,000 people. They concluded that, as of January 2025, some 75,200 people died a violent death in Gaza during the war, the vast majority caused by Israeli munitions.

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At that time, the Health Ministry in the Gaza Strip placed the number of those killed since the war's start at 45,660. In other words, the Health Ministry's data undercounted the true total by about 40 percent.

The study hasn't yet undergone peer review – it was published as a "preprint" – but its results are very similar to those of a study conducted by completely different methods and published last January by researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. That group also estimated the disparity between the Health Ministry data and the true figures to be about 40 percent.

Professor Spagat is a legitimate researcher. And when you read the pre-print, you see that he tries to compensate for potential problems, like people being surveyed inflating the number of dead household members in hopes of getting Hamas or PA payments.

But other potential methodological problems are not adequately addressed. While the survey attempts to compensate for subconscious bias by the researchers choosing households that represent Gaza's demographics, it does not seem to account for subconscious bias in avoiding surveying households with zero deaths.

Other data in the survey indicate that perhaps the methodology does not reflect Gaza's reality. For example, it counted family births that would map to over 79,000 births in Gaza over the 15 months of the survey, which is higher than the assumed 75,000 or so normally born in Gaza in a 15 month period - and it is assumed (by some) that the number of live births decreased significantly during the war due to increased miscarriages. This indicates that it is possible that the same households who exaggerated death rates would also exaggerate birth rates, for the same honor-based reasons.

Another major problem: The survey estimates 12,200 missing people in Gaza based on this survey, done in January 2025. In the ceasefire period afterwards, less than 1,000 bodies were recovered, indicating that there were never 10,000 or 11,000 missing people as had been reported by Hamas and repeated by the UN. This again indicates that the survey itself has methodological flaws - of the reality doesn't jive with its estimates, then there must be something wrong with how the survey was done and written up.

An even bigger problem is that the surveyed households said that 281 of their members left Gaza, while 457 of their members died (393 violently.) But we know that the total number of Gazans who left has been over 100,000 (some say 110,000), much higher than this survey indicates (about 56,000.) Is it possible that many households counted those who fled Gaza as being killed to make themselves look more steadfast in the face of war? That one data point by itself can account for the entire discrepancy of numbers between the Ministry of Health and this survey.

Which brings up perhaps the biggest problem. The Ministry of Health has been trying to make its death count as high as possible, by not only counting bodies but also allowing people to fill out surveys of unreported "martyrs." It has been publicizing these surveys constantly for over a year. What incentive do people have to not report their family member deaths to the ministry? In other words, what can reasonably account for such a discrepancy between MoH statistics and this survey?

The survey team did not seem to try to match up names of the deceased with the MoH published lists, perhaps for privacy reasons. The paper does not address this critical question of how the MoH could be realistically undercounting the deaths by 40%.

I do not think that the survey was consciously biased. But I think that the implementation allowed for significant bias on the part of the survey team - all from Gaza - as well as from families who might, for various reasons, want to make it look like they are more heroic.

Either way, its numbers on missing people and those who left Gaza are so out of whack with other sources that it appears that its methodology itself to ensure that the households surveyed represent Gaza reality was badly flawed.