Last week, the Lancet, a well-respected British medical journal, published a letter from three academics – Rasha Khatib, Martin McKee, and Salim Yusuf – discussing the death toll in Gaza.
The letter, which is not peer-reviewed, suggests that, if the death toll in Gaza is 37 396, then it is “not implausible” to estimate that up to 186 000 deaths could be attributed to the war at some point in the future.
Already, the figure has taken on a life of its own. Zarah Sultana, writing on X, said “The Lancet - the most prestigious medical journal in the world - conservatively estimates that the death toll in Gaza could be 186,000 or more. That’s 8% of the population”. The “Gaza Genocide” entry on Wikipedia already cites the figure.
A former UN official also shared that “1 in every 12 Gaza inhabitants [have been] killed in the last 9 months of genocide”.