Casualty Bot

Posting casualty counts 1 person at a time on Bluesky. You can follow the bot here. Profile pic is from here.

Currently focussed on #Gaza, more conflicts to come.

This bot started in Jan 2024 and so has been posting a backlog. There has been a 2 month break from 12th March to 8th May: due to Israel's assasination of a substantial number of workers in the Gaza Ministry of Health (and destruction of infrastructure), the casualty updates which came almost daily have been hard to come by.

It's hard to know where to go from here, on the one hand a bot reporting casualties should try to be accurate and sourced. On the other hand, the aim of the bot is to see every single victim, even if their name has not been recorded, and to stop because of the scale of destruction seems perverse.

Currently the estimates are based on this Lancet paper meaning 59% of deaths are counted as civilians (an underestimate) to a pro-rated 141 civilians killed per day.

Unfortunately there's nowhere for the estimates to go but up so the methodology may change as time goes by. I'm aware that the real number is likely to be over 100,000, possibly over 200,000 but it's hard to find anything sourced although it might make sense to switch to this number at some point. Either way, the plan is for the bot to do one post for every person killed.