Smriti Mallapaty in Nature:
Since war broke out in the Gaza Strip almost a year ago, the official number of Palestinians killed exceeds 41,000. But this number has stoked controversy. Some researchers think it is an underestimate, owing to the difficulties of trying to count dead people during conflicts. Other sources say it overestimates the number of casualties. The count comes from the Palestinian Ministry of Health — Gaza, the main institution counting mortality in the region. It’s important to track fatalities during wars — and to estimate overall mortality — to hold warring parties accountable and to advocate for the protection of civilians, says Zeina Jamaluddine, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. The number of deaths also informs discussions around when to officially declare that a situation involves famine.
In the heat of conflict, the first way to count fatalities is to tally up the number of dead people. But capturing the number of deaths in the densely populated urban centres of Gaza presents unique challenges, says Emily Tripp, director of Airwars, a non-profit watchdog based in London that counts casualties in times of conflict. “What we’ve seen in Gaza is entire families just being completely wiped out,” says Tripp. That means it can be hard to recover bodies, or there is no one to report them dead, and so deceased people will be missed in counts. Only when the conflict ends or eases can researchers begin the work of getting more robust estimates of overall mortality through surveys, modelling and statistical tools, they say.
More here.
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