[shihab]

This is common and expected. Even when a serial killer suspected of 20 murder is apprehended, arrest is often made based on one or two confirmed cases, more charges are later added as investigation deepens.

Also, keep in mind foreign journalists are completely banned by Israel from entering Gaza- complicating evidence gathering.

[culi]

This is not how the ICC conducts its investigations. The "41+" figure is from a Wikipedia article that is undergoing an edit war. The very source it is citing actually says 63k

[dlubarov]

As I understand it 41 is the number of starvations recorded in hospitals. 63k is a highly theoretical "estimate" based on the IPC scale and data from food insecurity in other parts of the world. It seems absurd on its face, since it would imply that an absurdly small fraction of starvations were recorded in hospitals.

[com]

I walked past the offices of Medcins Sans Frontiers (Doctors Without Borders) incidentally across the road from the very good new Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam, with posters in the windows imploring “no bombardment of hospitals in Gaza”.

The numbers are absurdly small, if hospitals were still operational, their employees not subject to extrajudicial killing from the occupation authorities and the facilities themselves not subject to bombardment.

Data from these killing fields is probably going to be far, far worse than we believe, once the dust has settled.

[dlubarov]

This doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The 63k "expected" starvations are spread out over a period beginning Nov 24, 2023 [1].

Over that period, something like 30k deaths have been recorded in hospitals and morgues. The 63k starvations claim would suggest that roughly 2/3 of all deaths were due to starvation, but somehow they were only ~0.1% of the cases that hospitals and morgues saw.

So Gazans are something like ~500x more likely to enter a hospital or morgue for wounds (or other ailments) than for starvation? How do you explain that?

[1] https://static1.squarespace.com/static/66e083452b3cbf4bbd719...

[freeone3000]

Due to the active bombing campaign against the civilian population, many Palestinians are wounded before they are starved.

[dlubarov]

About 2% of Gazans have died from the war (including militants etc), so that could maybe explain a 2% difference, like perhaps there was a 42nd person who was going to die of starvation but was bombed first. I don't see how it would explain more than that, and 42 is still quite far from 63k.

[legulere]

Israel does take selected journalists into Gaza on trips organised by the military. The issue is that journalists cannot make themselves an independent picture of the situation in Gaza.

[immibis]

The Gaza ministry that would have counted the deaths was also destroyed several months ago, which is why news media have been reporting the same death total of 40,000 for several months.

[yyyk]

This is wrong. They are still reporting daily deaths counts, that counts have been going up. The Grauniad is good about collecting the reports (but bad about other unrelated things).

[noman-land]

I was wondering about this. Thanks for the info. Got any links where I can read more?

[newspaper1]

This is a really good independent report on the death toll:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

[dlubarov]

Note that the 186k figure is not an estimate of deaths to date; the bulk of it is anticipated future deaths attributable to the destruction of hospitals and so forth. Lancet has also published some criticism of that correspondence - https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

The Gaza heath ministry's figures remain the best (and basically only) source of casualties to date. While they're no longer able to record many deaths in hospitals or morgues, they've adapted by collecting casualty reports from other sources like a Google form (which makes the data a bit iffy, but better than nothing).

[edanm]

It is a report that was correctly widely criticized. Certainly worth reading, but worth being aware of this.

(I personally think that estimating that the eventual death toll will be 4x higher than the somewhat-verified death toll that exists today, based on guesses of the impact of the war on the population, is very disingenuous and misleading, and mostly a way to just be able to say much higher numbers.)

[newspaper1]

It wasn't "widely criticized", it's taking into account the starvation, attacks on hospitals... estimating how many people are going to die is important work.