You are missing my point. To me it seems like 680k is just making shit up. Why is this reasonable? I can't even find what this "data point" is based on, so I'm not sure what I am supposedly ignoring! Just say where it is coming from, that isn't a person throwing out a random number.
I would love to be "well-informed", but how can I get there with hearsay?
> Neither is “wouldn’t the GMH cite higher numbers?” - how would you confirm that 1/3 of people in your city are still alive if people are scattered, communication is down, and an unknown number of people have fled?
Once again, the 68k figure is not confirmed! This is already an estimate. The figure for confirmed identifies is much lower, around ~35k. So this is a totally false argument. I'm not saying the estimate is wrong, I'm just saying that if there was a reason for the estimate to be 1/3 of people in Gaza, that's what they would say.
- begins with the high estimate from [2], which uses some very questionable data (like WhatApp chats) to argue that most deaths were not counted by GHM
- extrapolates it to the present, as if the casualty rate were a constant
- multiplies it by 5, which was the multipler that was somewhat arbitrarily picked in that Lancet letter [3]
- forgets that this includes future deaths (attributable to past conflict events), and uses the past tense as if all these supposed indirect deaths already occurred
They also end up with an estimate of "about 380,000 under-five-year-old infant" deaths, which seems unlikely since there were never more than about ~340k children under five in the strip.
Overall, it's about as believable as that letter which claimed Hamas was under-reporting starvations by over three orders of magnitude [4].
I would love to be "well-informed", but how can I get there with hearsay?
> Neither is “wouldn’t the GMH cite higher numbers?” - how would you confirm that 1/3 of people in your city are still alive if people are scattered, communication is down, and an unknown number of people have fled?
Once again, the 68k figure is not confirmed! This is already an estimate. The figure for confirmed identifies is much lower, around ~35k. So this is a totally false argument. I'm not saying the estimate is wrong, I'm just saying that if there was a reason for the estimate to be 1/3 of people in Gaza, that's what they would say.