Martyrs of the Israeli aggression in Gaza are buried in a mass grave in Rafah (Anatolia)
The New York Times reported a study by epidemiologists that confirmed that escalation of the war on the Gaza Strip may lead to the death of about 85,000 Palestinians within 6 months due to injuries and diseases.
The American newspaper pointed out that these victims are in addition to more than 29,000 Palestinians who were martyred since the beginning of the Israeli aggression on Gaza.
She explained that the study - which was supervised by researchers from Johns Hopkins University and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine - expects, in the absence of a change in the current level of fighting and the arrival of humanitarian aid, that about 58,000 additional deaths will be recorded during the next six months, and the number will rise to more than 66 thousand if there is an outbreak of infectious diseases such as cholera.
The study found that even in the best case scenario, with an immediate and sustained ceasefire and no infectious disease outbreaks, another 6,500 Gazans could die over the next six months as a direct result of the war.
Professor of Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Dr. Francesco Chicchi, said that the study estimated the expected number of excess deaths from health data that was available in Gaza before the start of the Israeli aggression on Gaza, and from data collected during more than 4 months of war.
Study details
The study included deaths resulting from chronic injuries, infectious diseases, complications related to childbirth and diseases affecting newborns, and non-communicable diseases for which people can no longer receive medication or treatment, such as kidney failure.
For his part, the director of the Hopkins Center for Human Health, Dr. Paul Spiegel, a participant in the study, explained that the expected deaths of 6,500 people even - with a ceasefire - are based on the assumption that there will be no epidemics of infectious diseases, because with the outbreak of cholera, measles or... Polio or meningitis, the number of victims would rise to more than 11,000.
Spiegel added that it is clear that military escalation will lead to additional casualties, but policymakers must be aware of the range of deaths indicated by the study. He said, "This means 85,000 additional deaths in a society in which 1.2% of the population has already been killed."
An expert in the quantitative analysis of deaths in conflicts, Patrick Bull, who was not involved in the study, stressed that it is unusual to see such a careful effort to calculate the potential humanitarian cost of an ongoing war, and added, “The study sheds light on this conflict in a way that we have not seen in any previous conflicts. It is "It highlights the potential costs in human lives and human suffering of future decisions that are within human control."
He added, "People will make decisions that will lead to one of the mentioned scenarios, or to a complex combination of them, and this gives us an idea of the possible outcomes of those decisions."
Source: New York Times