Medical journal claims war has “halved the life expectancy of Gazans”

A recent report in the Lancet medical journal raised concerns when it claimed that Israel’s war against Hamas had halved the life expectancy of Gazans. But a closer look reveals a different story.

“In the context of the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip, the Gaza Health Ministry (GHM) has reported 45,936 fatalities, and more than 10,000 individuals missing or under the rubble, for the period Oct 7, 2023 – Jan 8, 2025,” the study states at the outset.

It immediately notes the flaws in its data.

“The scope of this death count is difficult to fully interpret because it does not account for the size and age distribution of the Gaza Strip population,” the study states. “Moreover, the quality of this death count has been questioned.”

Lacking actual body counts, the study relied on casualty lists provided by the GHM, comparing them to the refugee register maintained by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). It later notes that about 64% of the casualties on the GMH lists were matched with individuals in the UNRWA refugee register.

“In the central variant, life expectancy in the Gaza Strip decreased by 34.9 years during the first 12 months of the war, about half (–46.3%) the prewar level of 75.5 years,” the study concluded. “Our approach to estimating life expectancy losses in this study is conservative as it ignores the indirect effect of the war on mortality. Even ignoring this indirect effect, results show that the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip generated a life expectancy loss of more than 30 years during the first 12 months of the war, nearly halving prewar levels. Actual losses are likely to be higher.”

- BeitEmet - House of Truth — Palestinians shop at the Deir al Balah market in Gaza December 192024 Photo by Ali HassanFlash90

This Lancet report followed another that reassessed the official casualty reports, claiming that earlier estimates underreported Gaza casualties by about 41%. While the GMH reported that 37,877 people had been killed in Gaza between October 7, 2023 – June 30, 2024, the Lancet study concluded that the actual death toll during that period was 64,260, with women, children, and the elderly accounting for nearly 60% of the deaths. This result was based on GMH morgue reports, a GMH online survey, and obituaries published on public social media pages.

It is important to note that none of the reports include data on Hamas terrorists who were killed while attacking IDF. The researchers also admitted that the hospital lists did not always provide the cause of death, so it was possible that people with non-traumatic deaths could have been included, potentially leading to an overestimate.

While the Lancet presented the two studies as authoritative, it did not reference an article it published just a few months ago, in November 2024 under the headline “Concern regarding Gaza mortality estimates.” That article, written by Andrew Gilbert, the Vice President for the Board of Deputies of British Jews, criticized Lancet for an article written by Rasha Khatib in July 2024, citing the GHM statistics.

“We are outraged that a prestigious journal such as The Lancet has published a non-peer-reviewed Correspondence by Rasha Khatib and colleagues that makes entirely unsubstantiated claims regarding the death toll in Gaza,” Andrew Gilbert wrote. “This Correspondence was widely misconstrued, leading to multiple reports that The Lancet itself has stated this number as fact. In a matter of days, we saw the claims of the death toll in Gaza quadruple, based entirely on Correspondence. We note that Peter A Singer, former Special Adviser to the Director-General of WHO, has said of this Correspondence that “there is no new data here. Its methods: take one unreliable number and multiply by another unreliable number to get a bigger unreliable number.”

“To inflate the numbers in such a fashion, however, is reminiscent of the tactics used by the regime of Saddam Hussein in the 1990s, which claimed that sanctions on Iraq during that period had led to 500,000 child deaths,” Gilbert continued. “A 2017 paper published in BMJ Global Health found that to be a “remarkable fiction” and a “global fraud.”

“The Lancet owes it to all its readers to make it unambiguously clear that the Correspondence it published did not represent the views of the journal, was not peer-reviewed, and is little more than conjecture,” Gilbert concluded. “We believe that anything less will raise serious questions about its professional standards and seriously damage The Lancet‘s global reputation as an authoritative publication on which both practitioners and scientists can rely.”

Despite doubts about its methodology, the article by Khatib extrapolated from the GMH figure of 38,000 Gazan civilians killed directly from the war, claiming that indirect deaths could range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths.

“Using the 2022 Gaza Strip population estimate of 2,375,259, this number would translate to 7.9 percent of the total population in the Gaza Strip,” the study said. “Even if the conflict ends immediately, there will continue to be many indirect deaths in the coming months and years from causes such as reproductive, communicable, and non-communicable diseases,” Khatib wrote.

The study cited these figures while reiterating the International Court of Justice rulings ordering Israel to “take effective measures to prevent acts of genocide in Gaza.”

In November, The Henry Jackson Society think tank published a report questioning the veracity of the GHM numbers, citing several inaccuracies:

Men listed as women to inflate female fatalities.
Adults registered as children.
Inclusion of natural deaths in reporting. This figure is estimated at around 5,000 per year.

The report also cited the disproportionate number of deaths of fighting-age men. The IDF estimates that approximately 17,000 Hamas terrorists have been killed in the fighting.

“Data analysis indicates that proportionally most fatalities are men aged 15–45, contradicting claims that civilian populations are being disproportionately targeted,” the report noted. “This age demographic aligns closely with the expected profile of combatants, further supported by spikes in deaths of men reported by family sources rather than hospitals. This evidence suggests that many fatalities classified as civilian may be combatants, a distinction omitted from official reporting.”

It also questioned the role of the Gaza Health Ministry, noting that it was under the full control of Hamas, a terrorist organization, making the GMH a biased source.

While many media cite the GMH numbers without question, even the United Nations was forced to revise its claims. In March, the U.N. Children’s Fund stated that 13,450 children had been killed in Gaza, citing figures from the GMH. Two months later, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) released updated casualty figures putting the number of Gazan children who had died in the war as of April 30 at 7,797, a roughly 42% drop from the mid-March numbers. It also revised down the estimated number of women casualties from more than 9,500 to fewer than 5,000. The organization blamed the discrepancy on “the fog of war.”

The flaws in casualty estimates have been brought by many researchers, far more than can be brought in this article. The purpose of this article is to present the issue and ask why the media continue to cite blatantly flawed statistics based on questionable claims made by the Hamas-run Health Ministry that are obviously inaccurate and do not even make a pretense of omitting armed Hamas combatants. Even more egregious is the Lancet publishing two articles based on these claims, seeming to lend scientific credence to Hamas propaganda.

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