Life expectancy in Gaza reportedly decreased between October 2023 and September 2024, according to a new eight-page paper initially published in The Lancet.
The research found that life expectancy decreased by 34.9 years during the first year of the war. The decrease was greater for men than for women. This figure is nearly half of prewar levels.
The paper evaluates the quality of the Gaza Health Ministry’s death count, which registered 45,936 deaths between October 7, 2023, and January 8, 2025.
The paper determined that the GHM data was reliable. The researchers did this by comparing the list of individuals with individuals in the UNRWA refugee register and then comparing the proportions of the matched fatalities with the proportions of registered refugees in the 2017 census.
They then used census data, GHM fatality information, and other data to produce estimates of life expectancy losses.
The data excludes the indirect effect of war on life expectancy, therefore excluding deaths due to causes other than war fatalities.
For men, the life expectancy pre-war was 73.6 years, and in the twelve months following, it dropped to 35.6 years (central variant).
For women, the life expectancy pre-war was 77.5 years, dropping to 47.5 years (central variant).
This constitutes a 51.6% decrease for men and a 38.6% decrease for women.
The paper acknowledges that the GHM count may “erroneously include deaths from causes other than war injuries.”
However, it argues that while it cannot “verify the cause of death of individuals included in the GHM count, we do not believe that such errors, if they exist, would substantially affect our results.”
Validity of GHM data
There has been significant discussion about the veracity and validity of the Gaza Health Ministry’s widely cited casualty figures. While some research has said it is likely to be much greater than GHM reported, Israel has repeatedly posited them a lot lower.
Research by the Henry Jackson Society and the Fifty Research Group, published in December, revealed the numbers have been systematically manipulated.
“The Ministry of Health, operating under Hamas, has systematically inflated the death toll by failing to distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths, over-reporting fatalities among women and children, and even including individuals who died before the conflict began,” HJF stated.
Israeli and US intelligence data, corroborated by the Henry Jackson Society, estimate that nearly 17,000 of the reported deaths are Hamas fighters.
Andrew Fox, the lead author of the HJS report, explained: “The failure to separate civilian and combatant casualties contributes to a narrative that civilian populations, particularly women and children, bear the brunt of the conflict, influencing sentiment and media coverage.”
However, another paper published in The Lancet earlier this month said that the fatalities were likely undercounted and were estimated to be 40% higher than the GHM count.
The analysis was carried out by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Yale University, and other institutions.
