Including both combatants and civilians, as reported by Israeli sources. This market will resolve after the war is over and official estimates are available. Close date may be extended.
Note: This market it only for Palestinian deaths, i.e. people from Gaza and potentially the West Bank (but only if the deaths are related to the war). This will not include any deaths from other parties that might join the war, nor of Israeli-Arabs, regardless of how they identify. This is done to clear up the market definitions and make it resolvable, not because of taking any stance as to people's identities.
UPDATE from Oct 13th:
The following criteria will be used to determine if the war is over. Either of the following should be true:
There's a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas that lasts for at least 30 days.
There's a 30-day period in which less than 100 people die on the Palestinian side due to the war, even in the absence of a formal ceasefire agreement.
Update from Oct 15th:
To avoid bias when resolving this market, I've sold all my positions and will no longer place additional bets.
Update from July 8th 2024:
Since the war has now lasted much longer than expected, resolving this market will likely prove to be very difficult. I will ask for help from both Israeli and Palestinian Manifold/Metaculus users in helping me figure out a fair estimate from Israeli sources, once the war is complete.
See also
1,000
3.00
Israeli Wiki cites the INSS, which seems to be a fairly reputable source. I’ll most likely use them for resolution unless other reputable Israeli sources are named. GPT-4o has this to say about them:
The Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) is an Israeli think tank focused on national security and strategic studies. It is affiliated with Tel Aviv University and provides research and analysis on security, military, and geopolitical issues, with a particular emphasis on Israel’s security challenges. INSS is generally considered a reputable and authoritative source in the field of defense and security, often cited by policymakers and international researchers. However, its analyses may reflect a strategic perspective aligned with Israeli national interests, which could influence how some audiences perceive its fairness.
Current numbers as per the INSS (translated from the Hebrew wiki, see screenshot above):
Casualties among Palestinians:
• Deaths: Over 42,603
• Injuries: Over 99,795
• Missing: Over 10,000
• According to the IDF: Over 17,000 militants killed in the Gaza Strip since the beginning of the war, and more than 4,000 arrested.
Tech for Palestine have added a disclaimer on their data page saying "these numbers do not fully reflect the human toll" and in the link argue that the excess deaths should be considered the "real" death toll.
I think this is shockingly disingenuous and that it's obvious that they wouldn't be saying this if the death toll was as high everyone was predicting it would be.
Nevertheless, I expect more and more activists and organizations to adopt this talking point so it's important for this market and others like it to remain about the "attributable" deaths from the conflict.
EDIT: changed "directly attributable" to just "attributable" in the last sentence. This is to avoid confusion regarding direct/indirect deaths.
Both direct and indirect deaths can be attributed to the conflict and should be part of the death toll.
@Shai Excess deaths get used as the “real” Covid-19 death toll all the time. Why is it obvious to you that it shouldn’t count here?
@Panfilo That's just not how war casualties are measured. For example the Israeli death toll on October 7th are the deaths directly attributable to the Hamas attack, not the number of excess deaths in Israel that day.
I'm not saying that if Israel causes a famine those deaths shouldn't count, but I am saying you have to show that the deaths are attributable to the war.
@Shai I appreciate the example. But with all the hospitals destroyed from the war, wouldn't a lot of normally preventable deaths be added to that category?
@Panfilo Sure, but you have to actually put forth an argument / an analysis, you can't just take the excess deaths and slap a "war casualties" label on them because that's the highest figure available.
@Shai the war in Gaza had a much, much bigger effect than the Hamas invasion of Israel, and the Gaza government was effectively destroyed. These are the circumstances where we switch to excess deaths as the most accurate numbers. It would make no sense to do the same for the Hamas attack, not least because random effects might mean that there were negative "excess deaths". The situations are different.
The market doesn't say "directly attributable". The use of Israeli sources should clear up any concerns about pro-Palestinian bias.
>These are the circumstances where we switch to excess deaths
Is it? I don't think that even in large wars (WW1/WW2 etc) the death toll is just the number of excess deaths those years. At most it is used as a tool to estimate the attributable deaths (which may be indirect). Maybe I'm wrong but I'd like to see examples if so.
@Shai it will resolve based off Israeli sources only. I suspect there will be consensus among Israeli newspapers as to what the number is at the end of the war and that’s what will be used for resolution. American, British, Chinese, Russian, etc, sources will not count.
@CertaintyOfVictory I don't doubt that the GHM fakes numbers but the analysis in that article is unconvincing. Cumulative deaths will generally look pretty linear even if deaths look like Poisson distributions.
Update from July 8th 2024:
Since the war has now lasted much longer than expected, resolving this market will likely prove to be very difficult. I will ask for help from both Israeli and Palestinian Manifold/Metaculus users in helping me figure out a fair estimate from Israeli sources, once the war is complete.
Only deaths that occur during the war will count for the purposes of this market. Indirect deaths that happen years down the line (from, say, exposure to toxic dust) will not be included.
The Lancet estimate seems too high but not completely implausible. And unfortunately the war is still not over :-(
There's definitely going to be controversy regarding how to count indirect deaths in this conflict.
I'm not even going to get into the creative methods of counting I've seen proposed but I wouldn't be surprised to see estimates more that 100k deaths apart.
@Shai I've seen reports that ~100K Palestinians have fled to Egypt. If they are unaccounted for, you might see propagandists try to pass them off as war deaths.
@GazDownright This article from FP: https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/08/15/gaza-palestinians-fleeing-egypt-refugees-rafah-crossing-israel-war/
"CAIRO—Although Egypt has refused to accept refugees from the Gaza Strip, more than 100,000 Palestinians have crossed the border into Egypt since the start of Israel’s offensive in Gaza following Hamas’s attack on Oct. 7, 2023."
@GazDownright Anyway, I expect a lot of disputes around the death toll. People will compare the prewar and postwar populations of Gaza. How many of those Gazans have left though? There are plenty of people leaving and it's not like there are records for all of them. So this will be an overestimate. How many dead bodies are identifiable? Not everyone who dies will have an identifiable body. So that will be an underestimate.
@nathanwei Thanks. I'll have a read-through. I'm happy if some people were able to escape the horrors. I'm afraid the death toll discussion will have the world see the forest for only trees, though. Anything above [low arbitrary number] is too much anyway.