Undercounting Deaths in Gaza While Claiming It’s the Worst War Ever
David Swanson
World BEYOND War
41,909 bodies counted, 10,000 missing, death count higher than 51,909
We generally accept that if you do a census and only count the people who answer their doors you miss some people, and that you can calculate an estimate that reliably gets closer to reality than the list of people who answer their doors. Of course it will get closer, the more information you can gather. But those insisting that people who do not answer their doors be treated as not existing are widely understood, not as principled fact checkers, but as having ulterior reasons for desiring undercounts.
DIRECT AND IDENTIFIED
The fact is not really disputed that in every war there are people who die without being identified at a morgue. They may die from direct war violence or from starvation or disease resulting from a war’s destruction of hospitals. They may be blown into little pieces, be buried under buildings, drown in the sea, or die hours after being born. There’s no certain way to know the exact proportion between identified and unidentified deaths in a given war. But even in a dense, relatively educated place and even with the growth of social media, a zone in which hospitals, media outlets, power plants, and — in fact — every type of building, have been reduced to rubble is unlikely to set the record for the lowest percentage of unidentified deaths — much less eliminate them altogether.