just saw a post claiming the death toll in gaza is 680K and ??? where are people getting these numbers? they are so obviously unverified and made up
It comes from a leftist Australian magazine called Arena, in which authors Richard Hil and Gideon Polya pulled this number out of their asses.
There are decent debunks out there to read for details, but this is my favorite one:
In their article, Hill and Polya suggest that since October of 2023, 380,000 children under the age of five have been killed by the war in Gaza.
The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) and UNICEF estimate the total number of children under five in Gaza at ~300,000-342,000k.
That math doesn't math. They're suggesting more children have been killed...than who lived in Gaza before the war.
Even Hamas's own Health Ministry numbers (which are unverified and definitely include combatants) hover around 60,000 total deaths.
No serious demographer, epidemiologist, humanitarian org, or medical journal is putting the number anywhere near 680K. This article wasn't meant to be journalism or scholarship. It was meant to be social media fodder.
It's spreading through social media activist circles that treat viral moral outrage as a substitute for sourcing. Or thinking. Or doing math. Or knowing anything.
Tens of thousands have died and it's definitely possible the numbers are undercounted - but anyone inventing a genocide that outpaces the population in an act of mathematical impossibility, is generating propaganda.
