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The hardship of war does not end when the shooting stops, as every wartime death leaves behind family members whose struggle will go on for decades, if not generations. Millions of these bereaved survivors have lost their kin, including parents, children, siblings, cousins, spouses and friends, with scores being added daily by wars like those currently ravaging Gaza, Lebanon, Ukraine and Sudan.

As well as plunging lives into mourning and sorrow, wars destabilize the basic foundations of well-being, health, and family care. They can also fuel desires for retribution and, coupled with intimate familiarity with violence and feelings of injustice, propel cycles of war far into the future. If we are to break these deadly patterns, we need to pay close attention to bereavement among the survivors of war.

Measuring war bereavement

In our recent study, we quantified the extent to which family bereavement outnumbers war casualties, as each wartime death entails the loss of a relative for various members of the surviving population. This is exacerbated in the context of protracted wars in which people can accumulate bereavements—someone might lose a parent to war when they are young, and then a child to the same war in old age.

In Palestine, one of the regions most affected by war in the last decade, there were an estimated 10,500 conflict fatalities between 29 September 2000 and 6 October 2023, and more than 41,000 fatalities since October 7, 2023. On average, each of these deaths has resulted in 1.7 grieving parents and 1.9 grieving children. This means that around 1 in every 43 surviving Palestinians has lost a child to the conflict, and 1 in every 59 Palestinians has lost a parent to war during their life.

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