As Gaza's death toll rises, unprecedented denial and disinformation surge

Direct casualties in Gaza have nearly reached 40,000 people since last October, with at least 10,000 Palestinians still reported missing and presumed dead.

A recent article in the the Lancet journal estimated that total casualties in Gaza may already be as high as 186,000 people, once the scale of the conflict and indirect deaths are considered. The authors used standard applications of statistics based on studies of conflict zones to provide the most broad (and conservative) estimates of the true death toll.

That article has been met with a chorus of condemnation by those with no background in geography, statistics, disaster science or public health.

Propaganda outlets have preposterously called the research "Blood Libel," invoking accusations of vampirism against Jews from the Middle Ages to label the world's most prestigious medical journal "anti-Semitic," even though one of the lead authors sits on the board of the Israel National Institute For Health Policy Research.

Meritless attacks

Reports of deaths in Gaza have been subject to meritless attack since Israel began its bombardment last year.

Those attacks have come from the highest level of authority in the United States - including United States President Joe Biden.

Conflict zones often yield large ranges of estimated deaths because of the complications inherent to war, which have been weaponised to further obfuscate the cost of lives.

Bodies trapped under the rubble in Gaza will continue to deteriorate, becoming unrecognisable with time. Thousands will be found in pieces if any pieces are found at all.

Bodies crushed under the weight of collapsed buildings leave little behind to identify - a fact Americans already know well from our own past tragedies.

Nearly 3,000 people died in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks based on reports of who were in the buildings, who never arrived home, and the expected occupancy of the Twin Towers on that fateful day.

Even though the estimate of 3,000 is largely uncontested, only 1,649 have been identified via advanced DNA testing of bone fragments. And that's with the world's leading DNA technology and billions of dollars in federal funding.

The indirect death toll may be even higher. Estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's World Trade Center Health Program and the Victims Compensation Fund show nearly 4,000 claims have been filed for 9/11-related, including people with cancer and airway disorders.

Denial and culpability

Gaza officials haven't even begun to catalogue or count the real toll of Israel's aggression. How can they when the area is still subject to attack and most of its key infrastructure has been destroyed?

History teaches us that denial, especially of mass casualty events, serves to absolve responsible parties from guilt or spare them from embarrassment.

For example, Soviet officials have only recognised 31 of the estimated 4,000 to 60,000 people killed in the 1986 nuclear disaster at the Chornobyl power plant in modern-day Ukraine, and have sought to deny an accident had even occurred until radiation was detected in neighbouring countries.

American conservative media pundits and politicians flatly denied research showing that deaths attributable to Hurricane Maria (2017) reached 3,000 to 4,600 people, far more than the Trump administration figure of 64.

But deaths from hurricanes, nuclear accidents, conflict and other natural and man-made disasters have never been met with the kinds of outright contempt we're seeing now, as researchers investigating death in Gaza.

Scientists have been utilising the full breadth of data and technology available today, giving researchers more to work with in estimating total deaths from a range of mass-casualty events.

That starts with bodies in morgues, which comprises nearly all of the dead being counted in Gaza today, as well as anyone confirmed dead by the medical establishment.

Those counts also typically include excess deaths - a measure of deaths above what we expect based on the year-to-year averages over the past decade or longer.

Deaths from starvation, infection, disease, exposure, inadequate healthcare, and in some cases trauma-related injury and suicide are valid deaths to include when directly influenced by the conflict.

That still doesn't include the years of life lost from malnutrition and disability, or increased susceptibility of disease and disability from epigenetic inheritance that will plague generations to come.

Disinformation campaign

Yet, until the Lancet article, those numbers were not part of the public discourse. And now that they've entered the discussion, social media is ablaze with armies of paid disinformation agents setting fire to the entire field of research.

On the internet, everyone's an expert, regardless of their education, experience or actual expertise. Political pundits comment incessantly on everything from subtropical diseases to tropical storms with the confidence of seasoned professionals, though they often lack even a fundamental understanding of the science.

Attacks on public health researchers and geographers predate the pandemic but rarely have swallowed the whole American political apparatus and the general public in the way we've observed with Palestinian deaths in Gaza during the last nine months.

If Israeli researchers can't start the conversation in the world's most revered medical journal, where can they?

If an internationally-celebrated whistleblower and award-winning scientist who sacrificed her career, freedom and safety to report accurate death totals during the COVID-19 pandemic can't share death figures from Gaza without an onslaught of disingenuous political attacks, who can?

If we're not allowed to discuss the full extent of an ongoing genocide while it's still happening, when can we? After it's too late? Never?

When science bends to political pressure, when hordes of inauthentic social media accounts can shutter research, we are all more ignorant, helpless and blind to the reality of the world we live in.