BBC promotes The Lancet report on Gaza casualty figures

In July 2024 The Lancet published a speculative letter estimating that up to 186,000 deaths in the Gaza Strip could be attributable to the current conflict due to “indirect health implications”.

When a BBC contributor used that letter as the basis for her claim that “186,000…lives have been lost”, the BBC refused to correct that inaccuracy:

BBC TWO’S ‘NEWSNIGHT’ PROVIDES A PLATFORM FOR DISINFORMATION

BBC REJECTS COMPLAINT ABOUT PROMOTION OF FALSE GAZA CASUALTY FIGURES

Later the same month, the BBC News website published a report amplifying agitprop based on that letter and in November 2024 it reported on a parliamentary committee meeting at which the surgeon featured in the BBC’s article cited the same letter.

On January 9th The Lancet published a paper relating to the topic of casualty figures in the Gaza Strip and by the evening of the following day, an article amplifying that publication had been published on the BBC News website.

Titled ‘Gaza war death toll could be significantly higher, researchers say’ and credited to Raffi Berg, that report opens by telling BBC audiences that:

“The Palestinian death toll from the war in Gaza could be substantially higher than official figures reported by the Hamas-run health ministry, research published in The Lancet medical journal suggests.

The UK-led study covered the first nine months of the war, which began when Hamas gunmen attacked Israel on 7 October 2023.

It used data from the ministry, an online survey of relatives reporting fatalities, and obituaries. It estimated that up until 30 June 2024, 64,260 Palestinians died from traumatic injury, meaning an under-reporting of deaths by 41%.”

Only some two-and-a-half hours after its initial publication was that report amended to include a one-line response from the Israeli embassy in London.

“The Israeli embassy in the UK said “any information that derives from Gaza cannot be trusted” and served Hamas.”

Berg follows that with the BBC’s now standard promotion of casualty figures provided by a health ministry run by a terrorist organisation as “reliable” while failing to clarify that its longstanding policy of failing to distinguish between combatants and civilians is deliberate.

“The UN treats the health ministry’s figures as reliable.

The ministry’s figures do not distinguish between combatants and civilians, but a recent report by the UN said the majority of verified victims over a six month period were women and children.”

That link leads readers to a November 2024 BBC article by Mallory Moench promoting a UN Human Rights Office report which was previously discussed here:

SENSATIONALIST BBC ‘GAZA WAR DEAD’ HEADLINE MISLEADS AUDIENCES

BBC AMENDS HEADLINE FOLLOWING CAMERA UK COMPLAINT

Berg also promotes the BBC’s now standard excuse for publishing unverified information but fails to tell readers that Egypt also does not permit journalists to enter the Gaza Strip and ignores the fact that during past rounds of conflict, when BBC journalists did report from the territory, they also relied on Hamas supplied figures which they made no effort to confirm.

“Israel is not allowing international journalists from media organisations, including the BBC, independent access to Gaza, making it difficult to verify the facts on the ground.”

Berg describes the paper’s methodology as follows:

“The team behind the latest study used a statistical method called “capture-recapture”, a technique which has been used to evaluate deaths in other conflicts.

Researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine looked at how many people turned up repeatedly in different attempts to count deaths. The level of overlap between those lists suggested that the number of deaths directly caused by traumatic injury in the conflict could be significantly higher than hospital figures published by the Ministry of Health.

Gaza’s health ministry issues updated death tolls from the war daily. It compiles the figures from deaths recorded in hospitals, deaths reported by family members, and deaths from “reliable media reports”.

The report in The Lancet estimated a death toll between 55,298–78,525 people, compared to 37,877 reported by the health ministry.”

That methodology has been criticised by commentators.

Berg does not inform his readers that the paper published by The Lancet specifically thanks a Hamas employee for providing “essential” data or that it includes “acknowledgement” of “support” provided by a blatantly political organisation called ‘Marsad Shireen’:

“We acknowledge the Marsad Shireen team for their support in social media data collection. Additionally, we thank Zaher Al-Wahidi, Head of the Palestinian Information Center at the Ministry of Health in Gaza, for providing hospital and survey lists essential to this study.”

Neither does Berg have anything to tell his readers about the authors of this paper. The fact that they have previously produced (FCDO funded) speculations concerning casualties in the Gaza Strip is not noted. Neither is the fact that two of them – Francesco Checchi and Zeina Jamaluddine (who promoted ‘genocide’ claims nine days after Hamas’ massacre) – previously produced a problematic report on ‘Wartime food availability’ which was used for promotion of claims of famine in collaboration with a political NGO.

The fact that the paper cites a tweet promoting the notion of ‘genocide’ (Note 11) from the Hamas-linked NGO Euro-Med Monitor (which has been featured in BBC content) is particularly notable given that one of the paper’s authors, Hanan Abukmail, has produced content for that NGO’s ‘We Are Not Numbers’ project in the past.

Another of the paper’s footnotes (Note 13) cites a BBC Verify report published in May 2024 which was previously discussed here;

LOOKING BEHIND THE BBC’S ‘70% WOMEN AND CHILDREN’ MANTRA

The paper even recycles that July 2024 speculative letter to The Lancet, as seen in Note 14, promoting the 186,000 number which one of the authors of the letter described at the time as a “purely illustrative” figure.  

“Although these numbers are understood to refer to deaths due to traumatic injury, others have speculated that the indirect effects of the military operations against Gaza could push all-cause excess mortality to 186 000.”

Berg closes his report with the standard BBC statement which fails to inform audiences that terrorists are still holding 98 hostages in the Gaza Strip while uncritically promoting unconfirmed Hamas-supplied casualty figures and breakdowns:

“The war in Gaza was triggered by Hamas’s attack in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others taken back to Gaza as hostages. Israel launched a massive military offensive on Gaza in response.

The health ministry says 46,006 people, most of them civilians, have been killed by the Israeli campaign.”

Early on in the current war, the BBC chose to adopt casualty figures and ratios supplied by Hamas and to promote them as ‘reliable’.

BBC’S FACT CHECK DEPARTMENT ROOTS FOR HAMAS CASUALTY FIGURES

In February 2024, the BBC chose to ignore a statement about combatant casualty figures from a Hamas official:

BBC NEWS IGNORES HAMAS ADMISSION OF TERRORIST CASUALTIES

Later that month, it promoted a related Hamas denial:

BBC VERIFY YET AGAIN PLAYS THE STOOGE FOR HAMAS CASUALTY FIGURES

The BBC has also uncritically promoted assorted claims and reports from UN departments and assorted political NGOs without carrying out any independent verification.

As this report by Raffi Berg once again demonstrates, the BBC has completely absolved itself from fact checking claims concerning casualty figures. Rather, it is happy to promote any and every claim, be it – as in this case – from politically partisan academics who got the information “essential for this study” from Hamas, from the UN, which also uses unreliable Hamas-supplied data, or from the terrorist organisation itself.  

Update: Read Mark Zlochin’s analysis of the paper’s methodological issues and omissions here

Related Articles:

BBC NEWS CONTINUES TO MAINSTREAM LIES ABOUT GAZA CASUALTY FIGURES

BBC SOUTH REPORTER UNCRITICALLY PROMOTES QUESTIONABLE GAZA ALLEGATIONS

HJS ANALYSIS OF GAZA CASUALTIES HIGHLIGHTS A DECADE OF BBC FAILURE

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3 Comments

  1. says: Geary

    The sad deaths of ‘civilians’ dressed in black carrying RPGs or working rocket launchers.
    And the real deaths of women and chidlren killed by Hamas’s high proportion of misfiring rockets.
    Both Hamas and NGOs have every motivation to inflate casualty figures. The first for propaganda, the second to raise donations from the gullible.

  2. says: Helena Goldberg

    I m reading in the Telegraph that Berg is considering legal action against Owen Jones for pro Israel bias ?
    What is going on?

  3. says: tiki

    BBC
    As a media source with ‘always the right information, you can certainly tell us how many innocent victims there are in the Ukraine, Yemen, Sudan, 30 African wars etc.

    Lancet,
    As a medical journal you can certainly explain to us the medical mericle how, after the ‘Genocide’, the population in Gaza has grown 2.02% according the CIA factbook…..and not declined as you falsely write.

    Looking at the population celebrating the “cease fire deal, I did not see any pictures, like those from regions with real famine.

    So we are being sold lies & propaganda by the BBC & YOU!

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