March 7, 2024
Since the Hamas raid penetrated the
multi-tiered Israeli border security on Oct. 7, 2023, (an unexplained collapse
of Israel’s defensive capabilities), 2.3 million utterly defenseless
Palestinians in the tiny crowded Gaza enclave have been on the receiving end of
over 65,000 bombs and missiles plus non-stop tank shelling and snipers.
The extreme right-wing Netanyahu
regime has enforced its declared siege of, in its genocidal words, “no food, no
water, no electricity, no fuel, no medicine.”
The relentless bombing has destroyed
apartment buildings, marketplaces, refugee camps, hospitals, clinics,
ambulances, bakeries, schools, mosques, churches, roads, electricity networks,
critical water mains — just about everything.
The U.S.-equipped Israeli war
machine has even uprooted agricultural fields, including thousands of olive
trees on one farm; bulldozed many cemeteries; and bombed civilians fleeing on
Israeli orders, while obstructing the few trucks carrying humanitarian aid from
Egypt.
With virtually no healthcare left,
no medications, and infectious diseases spreading especially among infants,
children, the infirm, and the elderly, can anybody believe that the fatalities
have just gone over 30,000?
With 5,000 babies born every month
into the rubble, their mothers wounded and without food, healthcare, medicine,
and clean water for any of their children, severe skepticism about the Hamas’
Health Ministry’s official count is warranted.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu and Hamas, which he helped over the years, have a common interest in
lowballing the death and injury toll. But for different reasons. Hamas keeps
the figures low to reduce being accused by its own people of not protecting
them, and not building shelters. Hamas grossly underestimated the savage war
crimes by the vengeful, occupying Israeli military superpower fully and
unconditionally backed by the U.S. military superpower.
The Health Ministry is intentionally
conservative, citing that its death toll came from reports only of those named
as deceased by hospitals and morgues. But as the weeks turned into months,
blasted, disabled hospitals and morgues cannot keep up with the bodies, or
cannot count those slain laying on roadsides in allies and beneath building
debris. Yet the Health Ministry remains conservative and the “official” rising
civilian fatality and injury count continues to be uncritically reported by
both friend and foe of this devastating Israeli state terrorism.
Predictions of Human Catastrophe
It was especially astonishing to see
the most progressive groups and writers routinely use the same figures from the
Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza as did the governments and outside groups
backing the one-sided war on Gaza. All this despite predictions of a human
catastrophe in the Gaza Strip almost every day since Oct. 7, 2023, by arms of
the United Nations, other besieged international relief agencies on the ground,
eyewitness accounts by medical personnel and many Israeli human rights groups
and brave local journalists in that strip, the geographic size of Philadelphia.
(Unguided Western and Israeli reporters and journalists are not allowed to
enter Gaza by the Israeli government.) (See the open letter, titled “Stop the
Humanitarian Catastrophe,” to President Joe Biden on Dec. 13, 2023, by 16
Israeli human rights groups that also appeared as a paid notice in TheNew York
Times.)
Then came the Dec. 29, 2023, opinion
piece in The Guardian by the chair of global public health at the University of
Edinburgh, Devi Sridhar. She predicted half a million deaths in 2024 if
conditions continue unabated.
In recent days, the situation has
become more dire. In the March 2, 2024, Washington Post, reporter Ishaan
Tharoor writes:
“The bulk of Gaza’s more than 2 million people face the prospect of famine
— a state of affairs that constitutes the fastest decline in a population’s
nutrition status ever recorded, according to aid workers. Children are starving
at the fastest rate the world has ever known. Aid groups have been pointing to
Israel restricting the flow of assistance into the territory as a major driver
of the crisis. Some prominent Israeli officials openly champion stymying these
transfers of aid.”
Tharoor quotes Jan Egeland, chief of
the Norwegian Refugee Council: “We must be clear: civilians in Gaza are falling
sick from hunger and thirst because of Israel’s entry restrictions,” and
“Life-saving supplies are being intentionally blocked, and women and children
are paying the price.”
Martin Griffiths, the United Nations
lead humanitarian officer, said “Life is draining out of Gaza at terrifying
speed.”
U.N. Secretary-General António
Guterres, according to the Post, warned of an “‘unknown number of people’ —
believed to be in the tens of thousands — lying under the rubble of buildings
brought down by Israeli strikes.”
Volker Turk, the U.N. high
commissioner for human rights, said, “All people in Gaza are at imminent risk
of famine. Almost all are drinking salty and contaminated water. Healthcare
across the territory is barely functioning,” and “Just imagine what this means
for the wounded, and people suffering infectious-disease outbreaks… many are
already believed to be starving.”
UNICEF, the International Rescue
Committee, the Palestinian Red Crescent, and Doctors Without Borders are all
relating that the same catastrophic conditions are getting worse fast.
Yet, and get this, in this article,
the Post still stuck with the “more than 30,000 people in Gaza have been killed
since the ongoing war began.”
Just like the entire mass media,
many governments, even the independent media and critics of the war would have
us accept that between 98 percent and 99 percent of Gaza’s entire population
has survived — albeit the sick, injured, and more Palestinians about to die.
This is lethally improbable!
From accounts of people on the
ground, videos and photographs of deadly episode after episode, plus the
resultant mortalities from blocking or smashing the crucial necessities of
life, a more likely estimate, in my appraisal, is that at least 200,000 Palestinians
must have perished by now and the toll is accelerating by the hour.
Imagine Americans, if this powerful
U.S.-made weaponry was fired on the besieged, homeless, trapped people of
Philadelphia, do you think that only 30,000 of that city’s 1.5 million people
would have been killed?
Daily circumstantial evidence of the
deliberate Israeli targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructures requires
more reliable epidemiological estimates of casualties.
It matters greatly whether the
aggregate toll so far, and counting, is three, four, five, six times more than
the Health Ministry’s undercount. It matters for elevating the urgency for a
permanent cease-fire, and direct and massive humanitarian aid by the U.S. and
other countries, bypassing the sadistic cruelty against innocent families of
the Israeli siege. It matters for the columnists and editorial writers who have
been self-censoring, with some, like the Post’s Charles Lane, fictionally
claiming that Israel’s military doesn’t “intentionally target civilians.” It
matters for accountability under international law.
Above all, it lets weak Secretary of
State Antony Blinken and duplicitous President Biden be less servile when
Netanyahu dismisses the low death toll by taunting them: What about Dresden,
Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
As a percentage of the total
population being killed, Gaza can expose the Israeli ruling racist extremists
to a stronger rebuttal for ending U.S. co-belligerent complicity in this
never-to-be-forgotten slaughter of mostly children and women. (The terrifying
PTSD on civilians, especially children, will continue for years.)
Respecting the more accurate
casualty toll of Palestinian children, mothers, and fathers presses harder for
permanent cease-fires and the process of recovery and reparations for the
survivors of their holocaust.
Six months into Israel’s war, Gaza kids ‘fainting in streets from hunger’
- Calls grow louder for Israel to allow much-needed aid into Gaza as residents say unable to cope due to lack of essential supplies.
- Hamas delegation has left Cairo with an official with the group saying Israel “thwarted” all attempts by mediators to reach an agreement.
- Israel has “consistently and groundlessly” blocked aid operations for Gaza even as the enclave falls deeper into famine, according to a new report based on interviews with government officials, humanitarian workers, and NGO staff.
- South Africa requests additional action, immediate ceasefire order from International Court of Justice to prevent “full-scale famine” in Gaza.
-
At least 30,800
Palestinians have been killed and 72,198 wounded in Israeli attacks on Gaza
since October 7. The death toll in Israel from the October 7 Hamas attacks
stands at 1,139.
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