Paper
Anthropologist Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins (Associate Professor, Bard College) gathers previously published data to provide an overview of the human costs that have resulted, and will continue to result, from the Hamas attack and Israeli military operations over one year of war since October 7, 2023. It includes United Nations estimates of Israeli and Palestinian direct deaths in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank.
Most expansively, this report also describes the chains of impact leading towards indirect deaths, caused by Israeli military operations in Gaza and the West Bank. It examines the impact on population health of the destruction of public infrastructure, livelihood sources, reduced access to healthcare, water, and sanitation, and environmental damage. For instance, 96 percent of Gaza’s population (2.15 million people) faces acute levels of food insecurity. According to an October 2, 2024 letter to President Biden from a group of U.S. physicians, 62,413 people in Gaza have died of starvation.
The report builds on a foundation of previous Costs of War research for its framework and methodology in describing the causal pathways towards indirect deaths. While it will take years to assess the full extent of these population-level health effects, they will inevitably lead to far higher numbers of deaths than direct war violence.
Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins is an anthropologist and film-maker with extensive fieldwork experience in Israel/Palestine and in Greece. Her first book, Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (Stanford, 2019), has won five major book awards, and examines waste management in the absence of a state. She has also published on the relationship between waste and environmental impact assessments, electricity services, climate change adaptation, humanitarian aid, and the idea of heritage in the West Bank, as well as on the impacts of short-term rentals on local and displaced communities in the West Bank and Athens, Greece. Her second book, which explores the impacts of Airbnb on property ownership in Athens, is under contract with Duke University Press. She is beginning fieldwork on a next project on the rise of "demand avoidance" as diagnosis and lived experience for autistic people. Her work has received support from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Foundation, and the Wenner Gren Foundation. She obtained her PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University and an Msc. in Forced Migration from the University of Oxford. She serves on the editorial teams of Cultural Anthropology and Critical AI. More on her scholarship and film-making can be found here: https://sophiastamatopoulourobbins.com/.