Since the beginning of the Gaza war, The Lancet has published three peer-reviewed studies all to make Israel look as bad as possible.
All three suffer from severe methodological flaws that should have disqualified them from ever being published. All three have been shown to be false by things we found out later. Yet they were not only published, but they have not been retracted nor has the Lancet (as far as I can tell) published any serious criticism of them.
The first one, from December 2023, claimed to support the Gaza health ministry estimates of deaths by comparing the number of deaths per thousand reported of the general Gaza population with the number of deaths per thousand of UNRWA workers during the first month of the war. By showing that the number of deaths per thousand UNRWA workers actually exceeded the rate of Gaza deaths in the first month of the war, the study concluded that the early criticisms of the Gaza health ministry statistics were misplaced.
The major flaw with the study was the base assumption that Israel was bombing everyone in Gaza indiscriminately, not aiming at Hamas. Only if you believe that assumption would the UNRWA deaths be an accurate proxy for deaths altogether. Yet even the UNRWA data belies that, as the majority of UNRWA staffer death were working-age males while the 60% of UNRWA workers altogether in Gaza are women. In other words, the demographics of the UNRWA deaths more closely align with Hamas fighter demographics, and as we've seen since then, some UNRWA workers actually were Hamas as well.
An analysis of the data in subsequent months proves that the methodology does not hold up. In every month afterwards, the Hamas-reported deaths per thousand were far higher than the number of UNRWA deaths per thousand. So either the Lancet's assumptions that UNRWA is an accurate proxy for deaths in Gaza was wrong to begin with, or the health ministry started inflating the death count after the first month by a factor of two.
Either way, the paper's thesis - which was widely quoted for many months afterwards as proof of the MoH's accuracy - was entirely wrong.
The second peer-reviewed Lancet study was from January 2025. It estimated that the true death toll in Gaza up until June 2024 was not the 40,000 reported by the Ministry of Health but actually 64,000 - 60% higher. It based this on a math-heavy capture-recapture analysis. Not to get into the weeds, but capture-recapture only works when all the data sources are independent and random. In fact, two of the sources sites were meant to be complementary, nit independent, while the third - based on social media posts - was never intended to be a representative sample. The math was good, but the inputs were garbage.
Since then, we have seen that the Ministry of Health has had every chance to find all of those missing dead bodies, and it has found about 700, not the 27,000+ that the study assumed were there to be found (based on end of 2024 reported deaths.) Those tens of thousands of dead people never existed, proving that the paper was wrong.
The third study looked at life expectancy of Gaza in light of the war, claiming that it plummeted from 75 for 40. Again, it was peer reviewed, and the peers who reviewed it apparently only reviewed the math but not the cherry-picked data behind the math. The authors chose a 12-month time period from October 2023-September 2024, not taking into account that the first month had far more deaths than any other and that the rate of deaths per month kept going down throughout the war. If it would have chosen the calendar year 2024, the results would have been far different; if it would have chosen the last six months of 2024 the life expectancy would be even higher.
Moreover, since a significant number of those killed were Hamas fighters who were less than 30 years old, this artificially lowers the life expectancy calculations for the entire population, the vast majority of whom are not Hamas fighters. It does not at all reflect how many years a newborn in Gaza can expect to live.
Isn't it interesting that every Lancet peer-reviewed paper is not only severely flawed, and each of them have been proven wrong by subsequent data, but also that each of them are skewed against Israel? If th Lancet randomly published poor papers, one would expect that some would err on Israel's side. That never happens.
I don't pretend to be an expert in statistics or math, but I have asked AI programs to critique my analyses and they have not found anything fundamentally wrong with my logic. The weaknesses of the papers are real, not a result of my own bias, and have been proven by later data.
This is not a coincidence. It is a pattern. The Lancet would never publish papers that disprove these, they would never correct these papers in light of new information that proves them wrong, and from what I can tell, they have not published any letters pointing out these severe flaws.
I believe in the scientific method. This pattern of truly awful papers in The Lancet prove that science itself can be twisted by politics, and publications that are meant to be scientifically objective can be perverted for political purposes.
If hate for Israel outweighs the desire by editors of journals to insist on objectivity, then what good are these journals to begin with? If we cannot trust prestigious science journals, who can we trust?
Many errors here as you point out, but the reduction in life span from 75 to 40 is an absolute howler. Let us take the average number of deaths at 40,000 - cutting midway between the IDF estimates of 35,000 max and Hamas's claimed 45,000.
40,000 on a population of 2 million is 2%. Even if EVERY death was a 1 year old, meaning their whole 75 years expectancy had been robbed, this would only give you a reduction 1.5 years, meaning life expectancy would be 73.5 years rather than 75 years.
But it is likely the average death age would be 25-30, but let's take 25 for ease of calculation. This means that two-thirds of their overall life expectancy has been robbed, so 1.333% x 75 years = 0.9975 of a year, so 1 year near as. So that would mean the overall life expectancy had dropped from 75 years to 74 years... a far cry from 40 years. For that sort of drop, you'd have to kill over 40% of the population, about 800,000. Quite a giant cock-up for the Lancet.
I suppose in their defence, they're only doctors, not statisticians. My father was in fact a master statistician and did weather stats for the War Office for bombing raids over Germany, plus also later the Whittle project on jet propulsion... so I suppose some of that genetically has come down to me.
The other thing the Lancet have missed in talking about 'life expectancy' is the natural death rate. In a population of 2,000,000 divided by 75, this would mean 26,667 people would die every year from natural causes. I have read complaints that Hamas has not taken account of this and has in fact just included it all as 'down to IDF raids.'
This is a serious contingent. Even if at their higher claim of 45,000, we took this 26,667 away, we would be left with under 20,000 total.
Either way, when it comes to accurate stats both Hamas and the Lancet don't seem to know their asses from their elbows.
The Lancet may be Gaza-controlled like the UK.