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.
| 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 → 2023-12-31 |
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| Corroboration | contested |
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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
Demographic estimation over the first three months of the war. The 21,822 deaths reported by the Ministry of Health from 7 October to 31 December 2023 were redistributed by age and sex using a list of 13,101 identified deaths, converted into mortality rates, and fed into a kinship matrix model that estimates the probability that a child loses a parent. The result is 15,127 new paternal and 9,886 new maternal orphans, less 1,416 who lost both.
What the source does not claim
The authors state a limitation that could make their figure too high: “according to the health ministry, deaths are highly concentrated in some families”, and “this clustering of deaths within families is not accounted for in our model and could lead to overestimating the number of orphans still alive”.
Discussion and conclusions
The age-and-sex distribution covers 13,101 of the 21,822 deaths; the authors write “two-thirds of war-related deaths in 2023 (13101/21822)”. They assume that “this age- and sex-specific death distribution reflects the distribution of all deaths due to the war before December 31st” and use it “to redistribute the 21,822 deaths by age and sex”.
Methods, “Comparison of patterns of excess mortality and orphanhood from other sources”; Methods, “Combination of war-related deaths and background life tables”
The share of double orphans, 6%, is carried over from the Ministry list, so this estimate is not fully independent of the figure it exceeds.
Results, “Parental loss”
The estimate covers the first three months only. Among the authors’ reasons is “the potential decline in the quality of MoH mortality data as the war progressed”; they add that “the age- and sex-specific death distribution during the earlier stages of the war might not reflect the future developments of the conflict”.
Background, last paragraph; Discussion and conclusions
Out-migration is not modelled. The authors write that failing to account for it “might nevertheless lead to underestimating mortality rates due to the war by depleting the population at risk”.
Discussion and conclusions
The kinship matrix model being deterministic, the authors ran a Monte-Carlo simulation to attach uncertainty to their estimates. They write that “uncertainty was incorporated through two elements: 1) uncertainty in the background U5MR estimates from the UN IGME and 2) stochasticity from the additional deaths due to the war”.
Methods, “Calculation of the probability of losing a parent”
The authors call their estimates “conservative”: they “did not consider the additional deaths that might have occurred due to the breakdown of the health care system, destruction of housing and increased incidence of infectious diseases”. They also write that the Ministry’s data “might underestimate the true number of direct deaths”, and that “our estimates should be considered with caution”.
Methods, “Combination of war-related deaths and background life tables”; Discussion and conclusions
On the Ministry’s death counts, the study reports that they “have been regularly questioned, notably when the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) published a breakdown of casualties in May 2024”, and that “the World Health Organisation (WHO), Israeli intelligence services, and the UN consider that the MoH estimates reflect the actual number of deaths”.
Background, third paragraph
Who disputes it
Palestinian Ministry of Health list of 1 May 2024 (entry orphans-2025-001) — The Ministry list records 15,173 children; the study estimates 23,597. The authors write that the list “gives only a partial view of the orphan situation” and that it does “provide a lower bound for our estimates”.
https://doi.org/10.1186/s12963-025-00369-x
Who counted
Built on death counts published by the Palestinian Ministry of Health — a 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. They write that the Ministry’s method for its orphan list “likely resulted in the under-reporting of orphans”.
Note from the register
The Ministry list is entry orphans-2025-001.
— 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 Discussion and conclusions section. 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 Discussion and conclusions. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12963-025-00369-x.
Consulted via Only Receipts, entry orphans-2025-002, https://www.onlyreceipts.org/entries/orphans-2025-002/ (entry last changed 2026-10-03).
BibTeX
@misc{onlyreceipts-orphans-2025-002,
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 = {Discussion and conclusions. Consulted via Only Receipts, https://www.onlyreceipts.org/entries/orphans-2025-002/},
} 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: Discussion and conclusions
N1 - Consulted via Only Receipts, entry orphans-2025-002, https://www.onlyreceipts.org/entries/orphans-2025-002/
ER -