Lydia Polgreen writes:

For many Americans, there might be a temptation to disbelieve the enormity of what has happened in Gaza. After all, it is a catastrophe funded by our money, made possible by our weapons, condoned by our government and carried out by one of our closest allies. It’s little wonder that some want to downplay the damage.

Their defense is to cast doubt on the numbers. It goes something like this: The death toll, counted by the Hamas-run health ministry, must be an exaggeration to court international outrage. If it isn’t, then most of those killed were Hamas fighters, surely, not civilians. Either way, it can’t be worse than other horrors elsewhere, in South Sudan or the Democratic Republic of Congo, in which we Americans are blameless. Taken together, it’s a potent repertoire of deflation and denial.

Yet now is a time of reckoning. After two years of relentless violence, a fragile and uncertain cease-fire has settled over Gaza, bringing joyous scenes of Israeli captives reuniting with their families and of Palestinian prisoners returning home after years of detention. But that must be set against the apocalyptic reality survivors face: a moonscape of total devastation and unfathomable loss. Today there is a chance, if we want it, to begin to discover the true cost of this war. We might find that it’s even worse than we thought.

First, let’s talk about the numbers. In Gaza, the dead — at least 68,229 people, by the latest count — have been tallied by the Ministry of Health, which is, like other government services in the enclave, run by Hamas. This has stirred skepticism, to say the least. But experts in counting war dead told me that the ministry’s accounting has been unusually rigorous. It includes not just individual names of people confirmed to have died because of the war but also their ages, their sex and, crucially, easily validated identification numbers.

“The Ministry of Health, we know, for various reasons, is really conservative actually in putting people on the list,” Michael Spagat, a professor at Royal Holloway, University of London, who has studied the toll of war for decades, told me. There is, he said, a remarkable level of transparency. “The information is incomparably better than what we know about recent conflicts in Tigray, Sudan, South Sudan.”

In fact, for all the tally’s trustworthiness, many experts suspect it to be a significant undercount. Spagat and a group of researchers undertook a 2,000-household survey in Gaza that suggested that the official figures were likely to be undercounting the number of people killed in the war by roughly 39 percent.

The fatality figures, though, do not distinguish between fighters and civilians. This fact provides another claim: that most of those killed are Hamas fighters and so legitimate targets. But Spagat’s survey confirms another aspect of the death figures: The majority of those killed — some 56 percent — were women, children and the elderly.

“In a typical conflict, it would be even more military-age males than what you’re seeing here,” Spagat told me. “The percentage of women, children and elderly is unusually high.” One need only look at the shattered remnants of Gaza to know that Israel’s relentless barrage of bombs and missiles, far from being precision-targeted at fighters, fell on young and old, men and women, with equal force.

But the careful counting of the dead reveals only part of the war’s human cost. In many recent conflicts — in Darfur, Tigray, Congo and Yemen — as many or more die of hunger and disease as by violence. These are called indirect deaths, and they are often calculated by measuring the rates of death before and after the fighting began. Including these deaths is important, experts told me, because leaving them out obscures the true cost of war. [Continue reading…]