FACT FOCUS: Posts misrepresent report to falsely claim nearly 400,000 Palestinians are missing

Winnipeg Free Press

2 days ago

As the number of Palestinians killed in the Israel-Hamas war continues to rise, social media users are falsely claiming that a Harvard University study has determined that hundreds of thousands in the Gaza Strip are also missing.
'Israel has 'disappeared' nearly 400,000 Palestinians in Gaza since 2023,' reads one X post that had been shared and liked more than 35,700 times as of Thursday. 'Harvard has now confirmed what we've been screaming into a deaf world: This is a holocaust — and it's still happening.'
But Harvard did not publish the report in question. Moreover, these claims misrepresent data from the report that was intended to address an entirely unrelated topic.
Here's a closer look at the facts.
CLAIM: A Harvard University study found that nearly 400,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are missing as a result of the Israel-Hamas war.
THE FACTS: Harvard published no such study. This estimate misrepresents a map included in a report by a professor at Israel's Ben Gurion University that shows the distance between new aid distribution compounds in Gaza and three main populations centers. Using spatial analysis, the report determined that these compounds are inadequate and also does not address how many people in Gaza are missing. It was published on the Harvard Dataverse, a repository managed by the university where researchers can share their work. Contributors do not need to be affiliated with Harvard and publish directly to the repository without approval from the university.
'If anyone had asked me about these numbers I would have set things straight right away,' said the Yaakov Garb, a professor of environmental studies who authored the report. 'Instead the number was circulated and recirculated by people who had not read the report or stopped to think about it for a moment.'
The inaccurate estimate comes from a post on the blogging site Medium. In the post, the author uses a map from Garb's report showing how many people live in what are currently Gaza's three main population centers — Gaza City, central refugee camps and the Muwasi area — according to estimates from the Israeli Defense Forces, to determine how many Palestinians are allegedly unaccounted for. The author subtracts the former number — 1.85 million — from the population in Gaza before the Israel-Hamas war began — 2.227 million — for a total of 377,00 missing people.
But the numbers on the map are not comprehensive.
'These IDF numbers were not intended to sum to 100% of the Gaza population,' Garb said. 'There may be Gazans in other locations outside these areas of concentration.'
Many Palestinians also have left Gaza since the war began in October 2023, a fact the Medium post does not take into account. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics said in January that about 100,000 had left.
According to Garb, the map was meant to show how difficult it would be for people in these areas to reach new aid distribution compounds. He also noted that it had a typo, which he intends to fix. There are approximately 700,000 people in the Muwasi area, not 500,000.
The author of the Medium post did not respond to a request for comment.
Other estimates have put the number of missing people, typically defined as those who are dead under the rubble of Gaza, much lower than what the Medium post alleges. A June 2024 study published in The Lancet, for example, found that between about 15,000 to 38,000 people could have been missing at that time.
'Clearly time has passed, and more have died and been buried under rubble. But it is unlikely that numbers of people buried under rubble could increase to 400,000 since then,' said Shelly Culbertson, a senior policy researcher at RAND who studies disaster and post-conflict recovery. She added that even if missing people included those who had completely lost communication with their families, it is unlikely that the number would reach 400,000.
Garb lamented the negative impact this type of misinformation could have for Palestinians and those trying to help them.
'If somebody like me who's doing serious work thinks twice next time about, oh my god, do I even want to put out something about Gaza if I have to sully myself with this stuff, they've done a disservice — done a disservice to the Palestinian cause, which they are ostensibly trying to further. I mean, they need to realize that,' he said.
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