User:NadVolum/Gaza

Understanding the casualty figures
There's been a lot of argument about the casualty figures. Something will have to be put in about them but unfortunately it is not straightforward. My understanding is
 * The health ministry generates statistics on recorded deaths and identified deaths. The say they try to only include those who die as a direct result of the conflict not those due to things like disease or old age.
 * The missing are not included in the recorded deaths and is an estimation which doesn't seem to have a any methodology or expert doing it and is probably out of date.
 * Israel have a policy of hiding dead militants so they can't be used as martyrs. This will make the count of deaths of men in particular rather difficult, but means the missing probably contains a higher proportion of men than the recorded.
 * The recorded deaths are from dead bodies at hospitals and from trusted media including first responders.
 * There is unlikely to be much duplication between the hospitals and the media sources
 * The hospitals have gone down in importance as only three of the hospitals that did recording for morgues are still in action compared to the original eight.
 * The identified are ones identified at the hospitals that do recording of deaths, or using forms filled in in a hospital, by one or the internet.
 * The identified ones are not necessarily ones whose deaths have been recorded. They may be ones that are counted as missing
 * Identifying a death counts towards the number of identified but does not affect the count of recorded deaths.
 * The ministry say the major use is by wives who want support when their husband is dead.
 * It could be useful to know if widows of militants need the GHM to record the death to get benefits.
 * They say it also fulfills a purpose of closure by identifying the dead.
 * Also said if a whole family is wiped out by a bomb they may not get to be identified.
 * It might be possible to estimate the number of identified deaths which are for missing dead rater than recorded dead.
 * The ministry subtracts the count of identified from the number of recorded deaths and talk about that as the number still to be identified but some of the identified are among the missing. The missing should eventually be recorded so eventually they will be right. However adding the missing would be a better estimate of the number left to identify.
 * Professor Abraham Wyner's analysis is deliberately twisted statistics. Fom an analysis I saw:
 * The variation is far higher than one would expect on the most straightforward supposition rather than being too small like he asserted.
 * One can get close to the variation if on average eleven out of twelve of the bombs killed nobody and the twelfth killed on average six people. This would be just recorded deaths.
 * The anti correlation on different days between men an women killed can be explained by the ministry taking a day to process each category of deaths as a block.
 * The fighting where the IDF encounters Hamas seems from what I've read seems to mostly involve the occasional Hamas suddenly popping up and shooting and then disappearing if they can. They also set booby traps.
 * The demographics I believe is about 47% children, 25% men, 25% women, and 3% elderly.
 * I would expect the number of civilian men casualties to be the same or higher as that of the women and for the children casualties to be almost twice that of women. However recording is pretty much of a mess.
 * From a discussion above the GHM seem from their spreadsheet to use ages 0..18 inclusive for children rather than 0..17 which is what 'under 18' is supposed to mean in the Geneva Conventions. This is probably a mistake, I used the demographics of 0...14 and added a fifth for the 47% above which should approximate 0..17 fairly well.
 * At the UN school in Nuseirat boys were sleeping in the mens room and girls in the womens room so there can be a difference in male and female children casualties.
 * Anyway that is my understanding of the figures at the moment. A lot would be hard to get proper reliable citations for in anything like the form I've given. As you can see various bits are rather hard to explain or will give strange results, but how much is really missing for this article? I'm sort of inclined to put any methodology in the Gaze Health Ministry article and just put any figures here with a pointer there. Bit of a cop out I'm afraid. NadVolum (talk) 23:48, 24 May 2024 (UTC)