A correction was published on this article on 31 March 2025 (Population Health Metrics, doi 10.1186/s12963-025-00375-z). It corrects reversed author names and stray symbols in equation 4: no figure, no method, no result. The publisher has updated the original article, and the finding taken from it stands.
Methods, “Comparison of patterns of excess mortality and orphanhood from other sources”
| Document | A demographic assessment of the impact of the war in the Gaza Strip on the mortality of children and their parents in 2023 1 |
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| Published | 2025-03-03 |
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| Address | https://doi.org/10.1186/s12963-025-00369-x |
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| Access | primary |
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| Period covered | 2023-10-07 → 2024-05-01 |
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| Corroboration | single-source |
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The document was re-opened on 2026-09-28 and the quoted sentence appears in it word for word, at the address below.
https://doi.org/10.1186/s12963-025-00369-x
How this is checked, and how to check it yourself
How the source established it
The study analyses a list published by the Palestinian Ministry of Health. It gives the list’s age breakdown — 25% under 5, 32% aged 5–9, 29% aged 10–14, 14% aged 15–17 — and notes that its own estimate for children under 5, 28%, is consistent with the list’s 25%.
The list is a record linkage, not a survey. The study describes how the Ministry built it: “This list was assembled by looking for children in the Palestinian civil registry born to the identified adults who had died due to the war.” Its reach is bounded by that method — “only children whose parents are identified in the MoH lists can themselves be identified”.
What the source does not claim
The authors treat the list as a lower bound, not a total: “The list does, however, provide a lower bound for our estimates.”
Methods, “Comparison of patterns of excess mortality and orphanhood from other sources”
The authors write that the Ministry’s method “likely resulted in the under-reporting of orphans as it excluded cases where parents’ deaths were not formally recorded or where identification was impossible, and it omitted newborns who had not been registered in the civil registry due to the ongoing conflict”. In the next sentence they add: “At that time, the MoH had documented the identities of 24,682 out of 34,654 reported casualties, leaving 29% of casualties without names or identification numbers”.
Discussion and conclusions
Matching the two Ministry lists against each other reached 103 children. The authors write that of the 15,173 orphaned children “we could only identify 103 children whose names also appeared in the list of casualties” — they raise this to measure the mortality of orphans themselves, and add that “more work is needed”.
Discussion and conclusions
Who counted
The list is produced by the Palestinian Ministry of Health, the health authority of one party to the conflict. The study’s authors are affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, UCLouvain and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and declare no competing interests.
Note from the register
The study’s own estimate for the first three months of the war is entry orphans-2025-002.
— Only Receipts
Provenance and verification — where this document came from, and what we could not
check ourselves
- Read on 19 September 2026 through the public medical index (Europe PMC), whose host asks ten seconds between requests; the delay was kept. The publisher’s own site was not contacted. The sentence above is taken from the Methods section. The Ministry’s list itself, which the study cites as a post on the Ministry’s Telegram channel (reference 44), was not consulted. Nothing was re-analysed here.
Found by the monthly sweep of 19 September 2026 and read the same day through the public medical index (Europe PMC): « Correction to: A demographic assessment of the impact of the war in the Gaza Strip on the mortality of children and their parents in 2023 », Population Health Metrics, 31 March 2025, doi 10.1186/s12963-025-00375-z.
Words used here, and what each one means:
Casualties · Party to the conflict
Cite this — the source document first, this entry second
Citing the document is what carries weight. This entry is where
you found it.
Plain text
Population Health Metrics. A demographic assessment of the impact of the war in the Gaza Strip on the mortality of children and their parents in 2023. 2025-03-03. At Methods, “Comparison of patterns of excess mortality and orphanhood from other sources”. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12963-025-00369-x.
Consulted via Only Receipts, entry orphans-2025-001, https://www.onlyreceipts.org/entries/orphans-2025-001/ (entry last changed 2026-10-03).
BibTeX
@misc{onlyreceipts-orphans-2025-001,
author = {Population Health Metrics},
title = {A demographic assessment of the impact of the war in the Gaza Strip on the mortality of children and their parents in 2023},
year = {2025},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1186/s12963-025-00369-x},
urldate = {2026-09-18},
note = {Methods, “Comparison of patterns of excess mortality and orphanhood from other sources”. Consulted via Only Receipts, https://www.onlyreceipts.org/entries/orphans-2025-001/},
} RIS — Zotero, EndNote, Mendeley
TY - RPRT
AU - Population Health Metrics
TI - A demographic assessment of the impact of the war in the Gaza Strip on the mortality of children and their parents in 2023
PY - 2025
DA - 2025/03/03
UR - https://doi.org/10.1186/s12963-025-00369-x
N1 - Locator: Methods, “Comparison of patterns of excess mortality and orphanhood from other sources”
N1 - Consulted via Only Receipts, entry orphans-2025-001, https://www.onlyreceipts.org/entries/orphans-2025-001/
ER -