Thread by @MarkZlochin

¹ One of the most common responses I see whenever someone questions the accuracy of the death toll reported by "Gazan authorities" is:

"But Gaza MoH reports have been proven to be accurate in the past!”

This claim is misleading in two respects: 🧵

² First, while the differences between the total death toll in Gazan reports and the post-war verification carried out by UN and IDF have been relatively small in the past wars, there has always been a huge difference in the estimates of the percentage of combatants. ⏬

³ More importantly, unlike previous rounds, in which the numbers were based on official hospital records, starting from November 11, increasingly large percentage of reported death are no longer coming from the hospitals, but are rather based on “reliable media sources”. ⏬
washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysi…

⁴ And if that’s not enough, starting from January 6 the numbers also include death reports that anyone can submit via a Google Form.
(you can read about this in much more details in Gabriel Epstein's report referenced above and in an excellent overview by @KyleWOrton) ⏬

https://x.com/KyleWOrton/status/1751930196171616725?s=20

⁵ In other words, in this war both the total number of death and the demographic characteristics are much less reliable then they were in the past.

But is there still some meaningful information that we can extract from those official reports?⏬

⁶ Can we, for example, verify the accuracy of the dramatic claim that "70% of casualties are women and children" – a number that has been even cited by SA in the “genocide evidence” list it submitted to ICJ?

Well, it turns out that we can.⏬

⁷ Luckily for us, Gazan MoH occasionally publishes detailed reports that contain data from the hospitals that are still connected to the central information collection system.

And if we compare the report from Dec 11 to the last report published on Feb 10, here is what we see:⏬

⁸ In the last two months 2658 new death records have been added to the system, including 607 children, 642 women and 1409 men.

Percentage-wise this means 22.8% children, 24.2% women and 53% men, i.e. during the last two months children and women constituted 47% - less than half - of all deaths registered in the system. ⏬

⁹ Moreover, if we check the numbers of injured, we see very similar results:

6674 registered injuries - including 1428 (21.4%) children, 1487 (22.3%) women and 3763 (56.4%) men.⏬

¹⁰ Another important piece of data is that out of the 2658 casualties 4479 (67%) are males and 2199 (33%) are females.

Given the fact that the male/female ratio in Gaza is about 1.03, this means that out of the 67% males killed about 33% are excess deaths, which is consistent with IDF’s estimates that about one third of those killed are combatants.⏬

¹¹ To summarize, if we focus on the official data from hospitals records from the last two month of the war, children and women constitute less than half of all casualties, contrary to the claims about 70% cited by media and submitted as “genocide evidence” to ICJ.⏬

¹² Moreover, this data reveals that two-third of the casualties are males, supporting IDF’s estimate that about one third of those killed are combatants.

THE END