The effect of war on Palestinian life expectancy in 2023

The Israel-Hamas war, triggered by the October 7th 2023 Hamas-led attack in Israel, has caused extensive mortality and sparked a major humanitarian crisis in the region. Direct conflict mortality has been mostly concentrated among non-combatants in the Gaza Strip. Here, most of the population has been internally displaced and faces limited access to food, water, shelter, sanitation, and essential health services. We aim to assess the impact of conflict deaths reported between October and December 2023 on life expectancy at birth (LE) in Palestine —including Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. For this, we combine multiple sources of data on combatant and non-combatant fatalities and use demographic methods to impute the missing sex and age distribution of conflict mortality. We focus on LE because it is a widely used mortality indicator that is not affected by the population's age distribution and can be meaningfully compared across populations and over time.