Bilal Barakat 🍉 on Nostr: So regarding the article in The Lancet making the rounds with an estimate of 186,000 ...
So regarding the article in The Lancet making the rounds with an estimate of 186,000 deaths in Gaza, including indirect deaths…
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext
Estimating conflict casualties is something I have some prior professional knowledge of and have elaborated on a bit with respect to Gaza:
https://kolektiva.social/@bifouba/112484619382447608#.
Let's start with acknowledging some sloppy referencing by the authors so as not to be caught on the wrong foot if this is brought up by people trying to cast doubt on the figure: the reference given for the indirect to direct deaths ratio links to the wrong report (namely the “World Drug Report”), and finding the correct one is made more difficult by the fact that the wrong title is given. It's actually called “The Global Burden of Armed VIOLENCE" (not “... of armed conflict”), and it's not published by UNODC either. The correct link is this: https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/Crime-statistics/Global-Burden-of-Armed-Violence-full-report.pdf
Looking at the original source, one thing to note that is perhaps not perfectly clear is that it is the authors of the original report, not the authors of the Lancet article, who propose that a “reasonable average estimate would be a ratio of four indirect deaths to one direct death in contemporary conflicts”.
Another thing to be aware of is that the stated range of 3 to 15 excludes the case of Kosovo, where no indirect deaths were established (so the implied ratio is 0), and the ratio was 2.3 in Darfur.
One question one might reasonably have is to what extent other conflicts had gone on for much longer by the time the indirect deaths skyrocketed. The potential argument being that the fact that indirect deaths were eight times higher than direct deaths in Angola over a period of 22 years is not perhaps a valid benchmark for the current situation in Gaza. However, there are several conflicts with a duration of one or at most two years in their table with a ratio between 3.3 and 5.6. So that’s one potential counterargument taken care of.
None of which is to say that the 186,000 isn't extremely plausible, unfortunately. But it’s still entirely based on rule-of-thumb rather than an analysis of the specific situation and therefore doesn't advance the conversation vis-à -vis the unconvinced. I wonder, therefore, whether it wouldn’t have been better for communication purposes to produce an estimate that does account for the unknown indirect deaths, but uses a robust lower bound for them, in order to comprehensively reverse the burden of proof.
Tagging some people who linked to or commented on the Lancet article (or scientific approaches to estimating the casualty count in Gaza) in my timeline: Adrian Riskin 🇵🇸🍉 (npub1l27…zpk4) Elia Ayoub (he/him) (npub1vlk…m0nh) jburd (npub166f…fexe) Maltimore (npub132g…0fdk) Simulated Chollas 🍉 🥠🌵 (npub1uw8…lla8) katzenberger (npub1y3h…kyxr)
#Gaza #genocide #Palestine
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext
Estimating conflict casualties is something I have some prior professional knowledge of and have elaborated on a bit with respect to Gaza:
https://kolektiva.social/@bifouba/112484619382447608#.
Let's start with acknowledging some sloppy referencing by the authors so as not to be caught on the wrong foot if this is brought up by people trying to cast doubt on the figure: the reference given for the indirect to direct deaths ratio links to the wrong report (namely the “World Drug Report”), and finding the correct one is made more difficult by the fact that the wrong title is given. It's actually called “The Global Burden of Armed VIOLENCE" (not “... of armed conflict”), and it's not published by UNODC either. The correct link is this: https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/Crime-statistics/Global-Burden-of-Armed-Violence-full-report.pdf
Looking at the original source, one thing to note that is perhaps not perfectly clear is that it is the authors of the original report, not the authors of the Lancet article, who propose that a “reasonable average estimate would be a ratio of four indirect deaths to one direct death in contemporary conflicts”.
Another thing to be aware of is that the stated range of 3 to 15 excludes the case of Kosovo, where no indirect deaths were established (so the implied ratio is 0), and the ratio was 2.3 in Darfur.
One question one might reasonably have is to what extent other conflicts had gone on for much longer by the time the indirect deaths skyrocketed. The potential argument being that the fact that indirect deaths were eight times higher than direct deaths in Angola over a period of 22 years is not perhaps a valid benchmark for the current situation in Gaza. However, there are several conflicts with a duration of one or at most two years in their table with a ratio between 3.3 and 5.6. So that’s one potential counterargument taken care of.
None of which is to say that the 186,000 isn't extremely plausible, unfortunately. But it’s still entirely based on rule-of-thumb rather than an analysis of the specific situation and therefore doesn't advance the conversation vis-à -vis the unconvinced. I wonder, therefore, whether it wouldn’t have been better for communication purposes to produce an estimate that does account for the unknown indirect deaths, but uses a robust lower bound for them, in order to comprehensively reverse the burden of proof.
Tagging some people who linked to or commented on the Lancet article (or scientific approaches to estimating the casualty count in Gaza) in my timeline: Adrian Riskin 🇵🇸🍉 (npub1l27…zpk4) Elia Ayoub (he/him) (npub1vlk…m0nh) jburd (npub166f…fexe) Maltimore (npub132g…0fdk) Simulated Chollas 🍉 🥠🌵 (npub1uw8…lla8) katzenberger (npub1y3h…kyxr)
#Gaza #genocide #Palestine