An official Palestinian tally of direct deaths in Israel’s offensive on Gaza likely undercounted the number of casualties by 41 per cent through the middle of 2024 as the Gaza Strip’s healthcare infrastructure unravelled, a study says.

According to Reuters, the peer-reviewed statistical analysis published in The Lancet journal was conducted by academics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Yale University and other institutions.

The researchers sought to assess the death toll from Israel’s air and ground campaign in Gaza in the first nine months of the operation, between October 2023 and the end of June 2024.

They estimated 64,260 deaths due to traumatic injury during this period, about 41pc higher than the official Palestinian Health Ministry count. The study said 59.1pc were women, children and people over the age of 65. It did not provide an estimate of Palestinian combatants among the dead.

For the Gaza study, researchers compared the official Palestinian Health Ministry death count, which in the first months of the offensive was based entirely on bodies that arrived in hospitals but later came to include other methods; an online survey distributed by the health ministry to Palestinians inside and outside the Gaza Strip, who were asked to provide data on Palestinian ID numbers, names, age at death, sex, location of death, and reporting source; and obituaries posted on social media.

“Our research reveals a stark reality: the true scale of traumatic injury deaths in Gaza is higher than reported,” lead author Zeina Jamaluddine told Reuters.

Read more here.