‘Fake data’: Famous medical journal slammed for suggesting Gaza death toll could be 40% higher than Hamas figures

JERUSALEM – The U.K.’s Lancet medical journal recently published a report in which it claims the number of traumatic deaths in Gaza between Oct. 7, 2023 and June 30, 2024 is actually closer to 64,000 than the semi-official account according to the Gaza Health Ministry, a.k.a. Hamas, which over that period stood at some 38,000.

According to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine website, which authored the report, the findings “indicate that approximately 3% of the population of Gaza has died due to violence with an analysis showing that 59% of these deaths were women, children, and the elderly.”

“It did not provide an estimate of Palestinian combatants among the dead” is all you need to know about this discredited study in the Hamas propaganda outfit @TheLancet. https://t.co/9s2aLO5L4j

— Arsen Ostrovsky ️ (@Ostrov_A) January 10, 2025

Apparently, the researchers used a statistical method known as “capture-recapture analysis” to estimate the number of traumatic injury deaths, the LSHTM reported. This method overlaps data from multiple sources to arrive at estimates of deaths when not all data are recorded. The sources included Palestinian Ministry of Health hospital morgue records, a respondent-driven online survey, and social media obituaries. Needless to say, this method of data collection came in from some stern criticism, particularly from NGO Monitor.

Again @TheLancet medical journal published pseudo-scientific Palestinian propaganda, dressed up with graphs, meaningless algorithms & fake data from Hamas/Palestinian sources, UN agencies that parrot Hamas etal, and “Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor” – a notorius Hamas-run NGO… pic.twitter.com/SdfDpRuvND

— Prof Gerald M Steinberg (@GeraldNGOM) January 10, 2025

Not least among the complaints regarding the findings is they did not provide an estimate of the number of fatalities of combatants, upon which it has proved extremely tricky to get an exact picture. Hamas and other Islamist groups, who for the exact purposes of being able to expand casualty numbers do not wear uniforms, and their numbers – at a minimum thought to be some 14,000 – were not separated out from the alleged overall number.

NGO Monitor has recorded its issues with the Lancet for more than a decade, remarking in Jan. 2015, “The Lancet has ostracized, and to a large extent, demonized Israel and the Israeli medical community.”

In this latest case, NGO Monitor founder and president Prof. Gerald Steinberg, excoriated the flawed methodology. In a lengthy X post, Steinberg outlined the problems with the data, including accepting it uncritically from Hamas/Palestinian sources and parroting the information, as well as using the findings of something called Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a Hamas-run NGO. He called on serious medical professionals to unsubscribe from the journal.

“The ‘capture-recapture’ analysis that is the heart of the statistics-heavy paper works like this. The authors took three different lists of victims – the hospital records, the online survey, and those found on social media obituaries,” Sternberg wrote on X.

. @TheLancet says the Gaza death estimates are 41% undercounted. Lots of math adds up to a big lie. https://t.co/qWuHdjSknH

— Elder of Ziyon (@elderofziyon) January 10, 2025

“Between the three they found very little overlap: Only about 15% of people in hospital records appeared on other lists. About 33% of people in the survey appeared on other lists.About 54% of people in social media appeared on other lists They used these overlap patterns to estimate how many deaths likely occurred but weren’t captured on any list. A low overlap, they say, indicates that each list is a gross undercount of the total. Based on their analysis of the low overlap, they suggest that the three lists combined only captured about 45% of total deaths. This led to their estimate of about 64,260 total deaths during the study period, compared to the official count at the time of about 37,900 (which included unnamed people.) The assumptions behind this methodology are wrong.”

“The third list, from multiple social media sources like Instagram, is not a random sample of the deceased at all. It could be updated by anyone anywhere in the world. It is self-defining and impossible to verify. Using it as an input to the analysis is questionable at best. To give it the same weight as the other two sources for the purposes of statistical analysis and estimations based on low overlap is almost certainly a poor assumption.

“There are other potential problems. The survey form does not distinguish between ‘martyrs’ and ‘missing persons,’ and many of those assumed to be dead may in fact be missing – the ICRC has managed to reunite thousands of people thought to be missing.(Albeit not something they’ve managed to achieve with the hostages). Altogether, this is a case where the authors try to misdirect the reader with lots of statistical formulas but their basic assumptions that the statistics are based on are worthless to begin with,” he added.

Avi Bitterman MD responded to a X post about the Lancet report with a critique of his own. “Number 1 question about the methodology that makes all the difference here. Regarding the social media obituary list: When the authors say they ‘excluded deaths attributed to non-traumatic injuries,’ what did the authors do for obituaries that simply did not mention the death attribution?

“Recall that for the other data, the status was specifically asked. For example, for the survey data: ‘The survey specifically asked respondents to enter details of those martyred, a term commonly understood to signify victims of war.’ However for obituaries, this is not listed as the sort of information typically included in obituaries by the authors. Perhaps it is and perhaps it isn’t.”

In July, a non-peer reviewed letter published in the Lancet claimed the overall death toll in the Strip was some 186,000 people. This was a figure both disputed and ridiculed, not least for the insinuation that the IDF was responsible for all of those fatalities.

For those who wanted to belive the scale of the so-called “genocide” was indeed underreported it was proof-positive of Israel’s crimes in Gaza; for many others it seemed to be yet more evidence of the slide in the veracity of so-called experts. There was significant pushback, the Lancet even published a letter rebutting the claim, but as is so often the case, deliberate misinformation was put into the public domain to create headlines for the news cycle.