Haaretz: Gaza Health Ministry Numbers Were A Major Undercount.
A Horrific Update On The Gaza Genocide.
Throughout the genocide in Gaza, Zionists have attempted to undermine numbers from Gaza’s Health Ministry, with the mainstream media across the board referring to it as the “Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry”.
In reality, even the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has now acknowledged that not only has the data from Gaza’s Health Ministry been accurate, but it was actually a severe undercount of the real death toll.
The paper wrote in a recent article, “Israeli spokespersons, journalists and influencers reject with knee-jerk disgust the data of the Palestinian Health Ministry, claiming that it's inflated and exaggerated. But more and more international experts are stating that not only is this list, with all the horror it embodies, reliable – but that it may even be very conservative in relation to reality.”
In reality, the paper found that “the combination of casualties from violence and those who died from diseases and hunger led to the death of 83,740 people prior to January”, noting that “since then, more than 10,000 people have been killed, and that doesn't include those in the category of excess mortality”.
The paper concluded that the death toll now is likely close to 100,000, writing “The upshot is that even if the war hasn't yet crossed the line of 100,000 dead, it's very close.”
The article quotes Michael Spagat, an expert on mortality in violent conflicts at the University of London, whose recent study found that the civilian-to-combatant ratio, as well as the loss of life compared to population size in Gaza, is worse than any other conflict in recent years.
The paper reported, “The data, says Prof. Spagat, positions the war in the Gaza Strip as one of the bloodiest conflicts of the 21st century. Even if the overall number of war victims in Syria, Ukraine and Sudan is higher in each case, Gaza is apparently in first place in terms of the ratio of combatants to noncombatants killed, as well as in terms of rate of death relative to population size”, with more civilians killed per combatant that in Kosovo, Ethiopia, Syria, Colombia, Iraq and Sudan.
Michael Spagat also found that “4 percent of the population was killed” in Gaza, noting that “I'm not sure that there's another case in the 21st century that's reached that high”.
He also found that with over 100,000 people killed in Gaza, fewer than 1000 have been combatants.
The paper wrote, “According to Spagat, there was an attempt to count the number of names of terrorists that were published by Israel. His team managed to arrive at a few hundred, but it's difficult to compile a list of even a thousand, he says.”
The paper found that the reason the Gaza Health Ministry’s numbers are such a big undercount is because “The ministry's records are based primarily on bodies that have been brought to hospital morgues” but “thousands of people are still buried under the rubble of tens of thousands of buildings”, “some people were close to the epicenter of explosions and nothing remains of them” and “families who lost loved ones simply buried them without bringing the bodies to the hospitals and without reporting the deaths to the Health Ministry”.
As Michael Spagat noted, “some families just don't want to report or are unable to report, maybe the parents die, and the children, and an 8-year-old remains. How is the 8-year-old going to report this?”
But even the numbers shown in the Haaretz article are an undercount.
Recent IDF data showcased by the Israeli scholar Yaakov Garb found that there are currently 2.05 million Palestinians in the populated areas of Gaza.
But before the genocide, the population of the Gaza Strip was 2.227 million people, meaning that 177,000 people are unaccounted for, the majority of whom are presumed dead.
The entirety of the mainstream media, to this day, has referred to the Gaza Health Ministry as the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry in an attempt to give the impression that their numbers are not reliable, when in reality, the only problem with their figures was that they were a severe undercount.
Correction: A previous version of this article stated that there were 377,000 Palestinians unaccounted for in Gaza based on Yaakov Garb’s study. His study did originally have the total population decline at 377,000 people, but this was apparently based on a typo where he claimed there were 500,000 residents in the Al-Mawasi region, where he meant to write 700,000.
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“Study” can’t explain something, therefore the number is higher - brainrot