The effect of war on Palestinian life expectancy

Irena Chen, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR)
Ana C. Gómez-Ugarte, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR)
Enrique Acosta, Centre for Demographic Studies
Ugofilippo Basellini, Max Planck Institute for demographic Research
Diego Alburez-Gutierrez, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research

Reported death tolls from conflict events are subject to multiple sources of uncertainty. Potential underreporting of death counts may mean that the true mortality caused by conflicts is much higher than reported totals. Furthermore, it is often the case that only aggregate death totals are reported and the resources to verify the actual mortality patterns by age and sex are lacking. Existing research has used age-sex distributions from previous conflicts to disaggregate the death toll, which can differ from the true pattern. Thus, resulting estimates of mortality distributions can be subject to bias from these two sources. We present two approaches for estimating the age-sex distribution of the conflict related deaths that explicitly incorporate the reporting coverage and the age distribution uncertainties: a bootstrapping approach and a Bayesian model that uses novel priors to quantify the uncertainty. We apply these two approaches to the current Israel-Hamas war conflict in Palestine, in order to estimate the sex-specific mortality age patterns for civilians and combatants. Preliminary results show that mortality estimates (and life expectancy) can significantly change depending on the prior specifications of the reporting rate and the age distributions, stressing the importance of incorporating sources of uncertainty in conflict-related mortality estimates.

Keywords: Bayesian methods , Population, Shocks and Pandemics, Mortality and Longevity, Population projections, forecasts, and estimations

See extended abstract.