Eine deutsche Studie kommt zu dem Ergebnis, dass die Alters- und Geschlechtsverteilung gewaltsamer Todesfälle in Gaza stark den demografischen Mustern ähnelt, die bei mehreren Völkermorden beobachtet wurden

>Distorted and incomplete data from conflict zones can make accurate mortality estimates difficult. Robust estimates, that incorporate the inherent uncertainty of conflict settings, are essential for assessing and communicating the effects of conflicts. Ana C. Gómez-Ugarte, Irena Chen, together and their colleagues based their estimates on data from several public sources, including the Gaza Ministry of Health (GMoH), the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories (B’Tselem), the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the United Nations Inter-Agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN-IGME) and the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS).

And here’s your first problem. You have:

* Hamas.
* An Israeli NGO which is the opposite of impartial.
* Two separate UN sources.
* And the statistics Bureau of the West Bank.

Am I the only one to see the problem here? The sources they listed are all incredibly biased, and all have an incentive to distort their figures as much as possibly.

Hamas is at war with Israel.

B’Tselem is the kind of organisation which claims to care about the human rights of Palestinians and then stops caring once it means it has to criticise a Palestinian group.

That’s the same UN which has a human rights council with some of the world’s worst human rights abusers (and Israel as the only country specific agenda item), and a history of singling out Israel while ignoring and neglecting human rights abuses from the rest of the world.

And I don’t see why I should trust statistics from the same government which had the Pay for Slay program, and has a massive incentive to make Israel look as bad as possible.

>They estimate that 78,318 (70,614-87,504) people were killed in Gaza between October 7, 2023 and December 31, 2024. As a result, life expectancy in Gaza in 2024 fell to nearly half the level expected without the war. An update of their analysis, produced after the publication of the study, revealed that the current violent death toll likely exceeds 100,000.

This claim is central to their analysis. It needs significant support and has very little. It is, essentially, the current numbers coming out of the Gaza Ministry of Health – a Hamas-controlled agency in Gaza. 

Why do the authors uncritically accept the fatality claims of one side of this conflict – the side with a vested political interest in inflating casualty numbers for propaganda purposes?

>Our study introduces a novel methodological approach—a Bayesian model incorporating novel priors—to explicitly account for measurement errors in mortality estimation by addressing reporting completeness and uncertainty in demographic distributions. We use these methods to estimate sex- and age-specific mortality patterns and associated life expectancy (LE) and LE losses due to direct conflict deaths from the Gaza War . . . The age–sex pattern of Gaza’s conflict deaths aligns with UN-IGME profiles from past genocides.

So they are *presuming* a specific sex- and age-specific mortality pattern, which they choose to layer on top of their preferred fatality count, to arrive at their conclusion. This paper is a demonstration of that presumption.

„Lies, damn lies, and statistics.“