Bilal Barakat 🍉 on Nostr: As a diaspora Palestinian and demography-adjacent statistician, I am BEGGING you: do ...

As a diaspora Palestinian and demography-adjacent statistician, I am BEGGING you: do not circulate Devi Sridhar's Gaza death toll estimate/projection that was published in the Guardian the other day, least of all as a “scientific" figure.

I noted some issues with the calculation from the Lancet previously, but this latest extrapolation from it is based on misunderstanding even the face value meaning of that prior estimate. To recall: the Lancet figure was never an estimate of deaths "to date”, but of the ‧eventual‧ deaths. But regardless the Guardian article goes ahead and extrapolates the “Lancet deaths per month" up to now (!) through to the end of the year. ‧At best‧ that gives you an estimate of how many eventual deaths will be "locked in" by that point in time, but it is ‧not‧ an estimate of how many additional deaths will have occurred between now or of how many will have occurred by that time.

No doubt the true number of deaths that already happened is vastly higher than the official count, and no doubt there will be many additional "indirect” deaths in the medium term. And while the ultimate total unfortunately may but hopefully may not reach several hundreds of thousands, propagating figures based on unsound methodologies that may well in the end turn out to be overestimates carries real risks.

Do you want to help the genocidaires shift the goal posts and argue later “Look! We actually only killed 200 thousand people, not even close to the 500 thousand those alarmists claimed! Instead of the 200 thousand that we agree died, let’s talk about the antisemitic conspiracy to inflate the Gaza death toll…”? Do you want to expose the survivors to having to hear that “Things were not as bad as we feared” and for those saying that to have any kind of point? To paint Palestinian society into a corner where — for very understandable psychological reasons — facts cannot be accepted for fear they would diminish the actual suffering? Where Gazan researchers and doctors will be called traitors for their actual scientific estimates if those turn out to be any lower than the single highest number having been floated? Bosnia is a warning in this respect.

And for what? Israel's supporters don't give a damn about 40 thousand dead accounted for, and they won't give a damn if you tell them it's 400 thousand either. Remember Madeleine Albright. "Half a million dead brown babies is worth it." is absolutely a sentence these people are comfortable saying. And whatever Israel claims, there is no numerical threshold for the genocide charge. One hundred thousand killed in a year is PLENTY to make the case. Don't be pulled into a numbers game. The truth will speak for itself.

palestine group (npub1zxn…0kqm) #GazaDeathCount #Gaza