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10 points·stared··5 comments

The denialism about how many Palestinians are being killed is pretty disturbing, it doesn't take a whole lot to put 2 and 2 together with the population density and level of destruction. Hopefully some people will read this and sober up.

Some demographics only come to light decades later. Much though I value attempts to do this now, I suspect like the surplus deaths from Mao era policy, we won't know for a decade or more (good statisticians drove a tank through the claims in "wild swans" -the lower figures are bad enough)

In this case, I think we won’t ever get better estimates of the number of civilian deaths from demographics. The Palestinian authorities have a good reputation w.r.t. reporting the number of civilians killed. As the article says:

The Ministry's figures have been contested by the Israeli authorities, although they have been accepted as accurate by Israeli intelligence services, the UN, and WHO

The (linked) https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3w4w7/israeli-intelligence-... says:

“There’s no possibility of collecting exact data in this situation but their system is generally transparent and credible,” said the Israeli official. “But only with civilian deaths, Hamas deaths simply aren’t reported.”

Future birth rates and death rates will tell a story. It won't be a headcount but we'll put boundaries on the uncertainty.

But given the arguments I gave, I think it is a certainty that the error bars in those numbers will be higher than the uncertainty we have know.

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