In summary: DellaPergola utterly embarrasses himself with this clown-level "critique" of the Gaza Mortality Survey. The arguments presented are without exception mumbo-jumbo, scientifically speaking. In essence, apart from a number of points where he is just flat out methodologically incorrect and fails to spot high school-level errors in his argument (such as plain failing to understand what the Guillot et al. study he tries to cite in his support actually did), he just points to potential sources of *uncertainty* and then assumes, with absolute zero evidence or compelling argument whatsoever, pulling numbers straight out of his arse, that all of these uncertainties must necessarily work in the direction of an overestimate of deaths, while systematically neglecting to discuss any of the sources of sampling bias that do, in fact, *necessarily* contribute to an *under*estimation (chiefly that completely destroyed households can no longer be sampled).

This piece is science-free, embarrassingly illiterate (both statistically and literally in terms of reading comprehension applied to other studies) piece of garbage. DellaPergola outs himself as someone utterly incapable of letting facts get in the way of his racist biases.

***

“The first and most self-evident way to estimate the number of dead is by counting the bodies that arrive at morgues or are buried. Astoundingly, according to Gazan sources, this simple action was never performed.”

FALSE. In the beginning, those were the ONLY deaths that were counted.

"Granted, some of the bodies are still buried under destroyed buildings. But even in the most horrific sanitary conditions, it's inconceivable that there are still tens of thousands of buried bodies 21 months after the fighting began."

FALSE. This ignores that Israel has systematically destroyed the heavy machinery necessary to recover them. The passing of time (under bombardment) does not help shifting tons of concrete by hand.

"And at least according to the IDF, residents were warned to evacuate their homes before heavy bombs were launched.”

FFS. This is 100% propaganda. Israel randomly does this sometimes to provide its idiot apologists with the licence to claim this, but it is completely untrue that this is in any way consistently applied.

"The respondents (one person in each family) were asked about what has happened to their relatives since the war began.”

FALSE. They were asked not about their "relatives", but about the members of their own pre-Oct 7 HOUSEHOLD. For someone attempting a critique of the study's methodology, it is beyond embarrassing to not even bother to represent it correctly. There is indeed an auxiliary question about deaths in the wider family, but that's not what the study's published results are based on.

"The relative completing the survey could report the deceased adult because he or she will think of the original family composition."

FALSE. Again, DellaPergola embarrassingly doesn't even understand how the study proceeded. Respondents were in fact *required* to respond in terms of their original household composition, rendering his whole line of critique moot.

Claim: A stopping rule of 10 households in each sampling unit creates a distortion.

FALSE. Stopping after a given number of interviews WITHIN in a random sampling unit does not by itself undermine “the principle of randomness" at all, nor does selecting an arbitrary adult household member, *because any one of them would be responding with respect to the same household*. DellaPergola does not seem to understand how survey sampling works. The claim that households more likely to have been present and willing to respond are more likely to have experienced a violent death is pulled completely out of thin air, without even pretending to offer an empirical or a priori argument. One could just as easily argue that households with fewer adults (because some have been killed) are more likely to have the surviving adults away from home at a given time.

"A comparison of this sort (see the article by Michel Guillot and colleagues that was published in the Lancet in January 2025) identified 34,344 people who were killed (21,974 men and 12,370 women) between October 7, 2023 and August 31, 2024, based on detailed checks by the Health Ministry.”

FALSE. DellaPergola is illiterate, or perhaps more likely, didn't bother to even read as much as the *abstract* of the Guillot et al. paper. What they actually said is that of the 45,936 reported total number of fatalities at the time, they found 64.4% on the refugee register, which, given that the share of refugees in the total population is 65.7%, CONFIRMS THE 45,936 as the refugee+non-refugee total. DellaPergola tries to claim that Guillot reduced the estimate down to the number of fatalities who were *also* refugees. This is a horrendously embarrassing mistake on his part.

"Of these, 75,200 were killed directly by wartime operations, while between 8,000 and 9,000 died from circumstances that aren't directly connected to the army's operations (and all this is on top of the 6,000 to 7,000 who die in an ordinary year)."

FALSE. The 8k-9k are about deaths not from fighting, but from not receiving medical aid for disease etc. The notion that such deaths e.g., from starvation, or because Israel systematically destroyed dialysis centres, “aren't directly connected to the [Israeli] army's operations" is obvious nonsense.

"In other words, the division and redefinition of households as a result of the state of emergency in Gaza may cause the same death to be reported two or three times.”

FALSE. This is *at best* sloppy wording. For the same death to ACTUALLY be double-counted, two people from the same pre-Oct 7 household would have to be among the survey respondents in different households in the current sample. What he probably *meant* was that those deaths have a higher probability of being reported in the sample. This requires a lot of assumptions, such as that households with a death are more likely to have been split apart. Which under normal circumstances might sound like commonsense, because conditional on a violent death in the household, it was certainly exposed to violence that may have caused a split. But since in Gaza *all* households have been displaced, that argument doesn't work very well. Also, all else being equal, having lost an adult household member reduces the remaining size of the household and therefore the possibility for it to split.

The vastly more obvious source of NEGATIVE bias stemming from household structure is that the large number of households where *all* adult members have been killed are systematically excluded from the sample. But of course, DellaPergola doesn't want to talk about *that*.

"They also provide a contradictory figure from another source regarding the number of Gazan prisoners captured by Israel – 3,436.”

This represents the number of prisoners from Gaza at a single point in time (Source: jpost.com/israel-news/article-…). DellaPergola seems to miss that what is at stake for comparison with the survey finding is the number imprisoned *at any time* during the survey fieldwork period. Moreover, the number he quotes refers only to ‘unlawful combatants' not *all* prisoners from Gaza, or detainees from Gaza who are held in military camps under conditions of enforced disappearance - unlike the survey question.

" Since the same ratio must also apply to the survey's estimate of deaths, the latter number should fall from 91,400 to 34,380."

FALSE. There is absolute no reason why the factor by which the number of prisoners is misestimated - never mind that he is completely wrong in quantifying that factor, see above - ‘must' be the same as for deaths. For someone criticising the rigour of another study's methodology, “I'm going to take one of their numbers and multiply it with a fudge factor" is one hell of a suggestion for how to "improve" the study…

apropos... IDF Reservist on Sky News:

[...] They don't really talk to you about civilians that may come to your place. Like I was in the Netzarim road and they say, "If someone comes to here, it means that he knows he shouldn't be there and if he still comes, it means he's a terrorist." But I don't ... this is like what they tell you, but I don't really think it's true. They might be shot, they might be captured. really depends on like the day the mood of the commander...

@palestine
@israel
#GazaGenocide #SkyNews #IDF #IsraelWarCrimes