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. 2025 Oct 13;23(1):55.
doi: 10.1186/s12963-025-00422-9.

Accounting for uncertainty in conflict mortality estimation: an application to the Gaza War in 2023-2024

Affiliations

Accounting for uncertainty in conflict mortality estimation: an application to the Gaza War in 2023-2024

Ana C Gómez-Ugarte et al. Popul Health Metr. .

Abstract

The ongoing Gaza War has resulted in significant loss of life and intensified an existing humanitarian crisis. Despite increasing demand for accurate data, mortality estimates remain challenging due to the inherent 'statistical fog of war'. Accurate quantification is hindered by incomplete reporting and uncertain age-sex distributions of casualties. Official death tolls are likely influenced by damaged infrastructure, security disruptions, and political motivations, complicating detailed demographic verification. 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. We find that LE in Gaza was 42.3 (39.4-45.0) in 2023 and 40.4 (37.5-43.0) in 2024, corresponding to LE losses of 34.4 (31.7-37.3) and 36.4 (33.8-39.3) years, respectively, compared to a counterfactual scenario with no conflict-related deaths. This corresponds to 78,318 (70,614-87,504) conflict deaths by the end of 2024, reflecting a 14-fold increase in all-cause mortality during the conflict's first year. The age-sex pattern of Gaza's conflict deaths aligns with UN-IGME profiles from past genocides. To contextualize these estimates, we compare them with LE losses observed in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and all of Palestine between 2012 and 2019. Our estimates align with previously published work, after adjusting the reporting priors to ignore underreporting. Our versatile and robust framework for mortality estimation under conditions of data scarcity can inform future conflict research.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declarations. Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
A directed acyclic graph of the Bayesian model used to estimate life expectancy (LE). The ovals represent unknown parameters and the rectangles represent the available data used as inputs. The colors of the boxes represent the different dimensions of the parameters and data, with purple denoting a scalar value, orange denoting multidimensional arrays (age-sex), and blue denoting a one dimensional array (sex). The hyperparameters for the reporting rate and the age distributions are specified based on information elicited from prior and current work. We note that [Formula: see text] before Oct. 7th, 2023 is not included in the DAG; however, it may impact the estimation of [Formula: see text] (i.e. when estimating [Formula: see text] from B’tselem’s historical average)
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Age-sex distribution of conflict-related deaths for Palestine in 2023 based on the distributions: reported by the Gaza Ministry of Health (GMoH) [1, 17] on October 26th; ii) in 4 historical genocides (UN-IGME) [44]; and iii) reported by [33] between September 29th, 2000 and October 6th, 2023. Source: Authors’ elaborations on data from [17, 33, 44, 83]
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Life expectancy at birth at the national (in yellow) and regional levels using the GMoH age distributions for the Gaza Strip (in pink), and using B’Tselem’s age distribution the West Bank (in blue) for 2023 and 2024, with the prior of the reporting rate as defined in equation (5). The shapes indicate the observed life expectancy. The counterfactual scenarios of life expectancy without conflict deaths between 2012 and 2024 are indicated by the lines. For 2023 and 2024, the shapes refer to the mean value, and the intervals represent the 95% credible intervals
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Life expectancy at birth for the Gaza Strip in 2023 and 2024 using the age distributions from 1) the GMoH (in pink) 2) B’Tselem historical average (in blue) 3) UN-IGME genocide crisis pattern (in green), with the prior of the reporting rate as defined in equation (5). The points refer to the mean value and the areas around the mean estimates represent the distribution of the posterior samples of life expectancy estimates. This graph corresponds to the zoomed-in area of Figure 3

References

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