Abstract

Political violence produces excess mortality, yet its impact on survivors endures beyond the end of violence, reshaping the demography and social fabric of affected populations. This study focuses on those surviving family members who have experienced bereavement through direct death from political violence in Gaza between 2000 and 2025. To quantify family bereavement, we 1) reconstruct Gaza-specific fertility, mortality and population schedules for 1950-2025 and use them in a two-sex, time-varying matrix kinship model to estimate the kinship structure of the Palestinian population over time, and 2) combine these kinship structures with volent deaths documented by B’Tselem and Gaza’s Ministry of Health to estimate the prevalence of bereavement, adjusting for under-reporting of deaths and for the clustering of violent deaths within families. By the end of 2025, around 69 percent of Palestinians living in Gaza had lost at least one close or distant relative to political violence since 2000. Adjusting for under-reporting increases the population share to 77 percent. Our study extends the analysis of political violence beyond direct killing and highlights how bereavement from violence can impact familial and kinship networks, caregiving, social bonds, and individual and collective wellbeing. We discuss some of the implications of our findings on accountability. Most importantly, the protection of life and health care, the restoration of justice, and the recognition of the right to exist are required to prevent further loss. Accurately accounting for the full human cost of historical and prolonged political violence necessitates recognising not only those that were killed, but also those they leave behind, as well as dismantling of its structures so survival and collective healing can take place.

Bio

Yara Jarallah is a Senior Lecturer of Population Studies at the University of Waikato. Her research is driven by a passion for social and political justice and seeks to illuminate the impacts of systemic and structural inequalities on human populations and population processes and the resulting behavioural shifts, particularly in Palestine, Lebanon and among Arab migrants in the Global North. It is interdisciplinary in nature and cuts across research in sociology, migration, demography and public health. Her work underpins three major findings -1) that we cannot study population processes or their behavioural impacts without acknowledging and building empirical models that account for the broader structural conditions in which people live; 2) that we need to adopt a life course approach by looking at trajectories of events in peoples’ lives over time rather than at distinct single events; 3) that accounting for those complexities requires mixed methodological approaches and theoretical frameworks from multiple disciplines.