Counting the real casualties of war in the Gaza Strip

For some Americans, there might be a temptation to disbelieve the enormity of what has happened in the Gaza Strip.

- Lydia Polgreen

After all, it is a catastrophe funded by our money, made possible by our weapons, condoned by our government and carried out by one of our closest allies. It’s little wonder that some want to downplay the damage.

Their defence is to cast doubt on the numbers. It goes something like this: The death toll, counted by the Hamas-run Health Ministry, must be an exaggeration, to court international outrage. If it isn’t, then most of those killed were Hamas fighters, surely, not civilians. Either way, it can’t be worse than other horrors elsewhere, in South Sudan or Congo, in which we Americans are blameless. Taken together, it’s a potent repertoire of deflation and denial.

Today, there is a chance, if we want it, to begin to discover the true cost of this war.

We might find that it’s even worse than we thought.

First, let's talk about the numbers. In Gaza, the dead — at least 68,229 people, by the latest count — have been tallied by the Ministry of Health, which is, like other government services in the enclave, run by Hamas. This has stirred scepticism, to say the least. But experts in counting war dead told me that the ministry’s accounting has been unusually rigorous. Itincludes not just individual names of people confirmed to have died because of the war but also their ages, their sex and, crucially, easily validated identification numbers.

“The Ministry of Health, we know, for various reasons, is really conservative, actually, in putting people on the list)” Michael Spagat, a professor at Royal Holloway, University of London, who has studied the toll of war for decades, told me. There is, he said, a remarkable level of transparency. “The information is incomparably better than what we know about recent conflicts in Tigray, Sudan, South Sudan.”