Ramzy Baroud
( Middle East
Monitor ) – The first official reference to Gaza becoming increasingly
uninhabitable was made by the United Nations Conference on Trade and
Development (UNCTAD) in 2012, when the population of the Gaza Strip was
estimated at 1.8 million inhabitants.
The intention of
the report, “The Gaza Strip: The Economic Situation and the Prospects for
Development,” was not merely to prophesise, but to warn that if the world
continued to stand idle in the face of the ongoing blockade on Gaza, a
humanitarian catastrophe was imminent.
Yet, little was
done, though the UN continued with its countdown, increasing the frequency and
urgency of its warnings, especially following major wars.
Another report
in 2015 from UNCTAD stated that the Gaza crisis had intensified following the
most destructive war to that date, the year before. The war had destroyed
hundreds of factories, thousands of homes and displaced tens of thousands of
people.
By 2020, though,
based on the criteria set by the UN, Gaza should have become ‘uninhabitable’.
Yet, little was done to remedy the crisis. The population grew rapidly, while
resources, including Gaza’s land mass, shrank due to the ever-expanding Israeli
‘buffer zone’. The prospects for the “world’s largest open-air prison” became
even dimmer.
Yet, the
international community did little to heed the call of UNCTAD and other UN and
international institutions. The humanitarian crisis – situated within a
prolonged political crisis, a siege, repeated wars and daily violence –
worsened, reaching, on 7 October, 2023, the point of implosion.
One wonders if
the world had paid even the slightest attention to Gaza and the cries of people
trapped behind walls, barbed wire and electric fences, whether the current war
and genocide could have been avoided.
It is all moot
now. The worst-case scenario has actualised in a way that even the most
pessimistic estimates by Palestinian, Arab, or international groups could not
have foreseen.
Not only is Gaza
now beyond “uninhabitable”, but, according to Greenpeace, it will be
“uninhabitable for generations to come”. This does not hinge on the resilience
of Palestinians in Gaza, whose legendary steadfastness is hardly disputed.
However, there are essential survival needs that even the strongest people
cannot replace with their mere desire to survive.
In just the
first 120 days of war, “staggering” carbon emissions were estimated at 536,410
tonnes of carbon dioxide. Ninety per cent of that deadly pollution was
“attributed to Israel’s air bombardment and ground invasion,” according to
Greenpeace, which concluded that the total sum of carbon emissions “is greater
than the annual carbon footprint of many climate-vulnerable nations.”
A report issued
around the same time by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) painted an equally
frightening picture of what was taking place in Gaza as a direct result of the
war. “Water and sanitation have collapsed,” it declared last June. “Coastal
areas, soil, and ecosystems have been severely impacted,” it continued.
But that was
over seven months ago, when parts of Gaza were still standing. Now, almost all
of Gaza has been destroyed. Garbage has been piling up for 15 months without a
single facility to process it efficiently. Disease is widespread, and all
hospitals have either been destroyed in the bombings, burned to the ground, or
bulldozed. Many of the sick are dying in their tents without ever seeing a
doctor.
Without any
outside assistance, it was only natural for the disaster to worsen. Last
December, Medecins Sans Frontieres issued a report titled “Gaza: Life in a
Death Trap“. The report, a devastating read, describes the state of medical
infrastructure in Gaza, which can be summed up in a single word: non-existent.
Israel has
attacked 512 healthcare facilities between October 2023 and September 2024,
killing over 1,000 healthcare workers. This means that a population is trying
to survive during one of the harshest wars ever recorded, without any serious
medical attention. This includes nearly half a million people suffering from
various mental health disorders.
By December,
Gaza’s Government Media Office reported that there are an estimated 23 million
tonnes of debris resulting from the dropping of 75,000 tonnes of explosives –
in addition to other forms of destruction. This has released 281,000 metric
tonnes of carbon dioxide into the air.
Once the war is
over, Gaza will be rebuilt. Though Palestinian sumud (steadfastness) is capable
of restoring Gaza to its former self, however long it takes, a study conducted
by Queen Mary University in the UK said that, for the destroyed structures to be
rebuilt, an additional 60 million tonnes of CO2 will be released into an
already severely impacted environment.
In essence, this
means that even after the devastating war on Gaza ends and the rebuilding of
the Strip concludes, the ecological and environmental harm that Israel has
caused will remain for many years to come.
It is baffling
that the very Western countries, which speak tirelessly about environmental
protection, preservation and warning against carbon emissions, are the same
entities that helped sustain the war on Gaza, either through arming Israel or
remaining silent in the face of the ongoing atrocities.
The price of
this hypocrisy is the enduring suffering of millions of people and the
devastation of their environment. Isn’t it time for the world to wake up and
collectively declare: enough is enough?
Juan
Cole
Ann
Arbor (Informed Comment) – A team of researchers at the London School of
Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Yale has published a study in The Lancet
finding that the Gaza Ministry of Health substantially underestimated war
deaths in Gaza. Casualties were 69% higher than reported.
The
current estimate by the Ministry of Health for Palestinians killed by Israeli
weaponry in their total war on Gaza is 46,000. The Lancet study suggests the
true number today is closer to 70,000.
Researchers
said that they used data from the Palestinian Ministry of Health hospital
records, a Ministry of Health online survey, and obituaries that appeared on
social media to estimate the true number of deaths between October 7, 2023, and
June 30, 2024.
The
researchers then used statistical models to look at the overlap between these
sources. After combining the results, they calculated the estimated total
deaths during this period. They then compared age- and sex-specific death rates
with those from 2022. This method has been used successfully in other conflict
zones.
The
team estimated 64,260 deaths due to traumatic injury (i.e. by military
weaponry) during the study period, October – June. The Ministry of Health
estimate at that time was 37,877 (that is, the actual number was 69% higher)
AFP
interviewed Patrick Ball, a sociologist of human rights on whose doctoral
committee I served years ago, about the method. He has used it to estimate
deaths in conflicts “in Guatemala, Kosovo, Peru and Colombia.” AFP writes that
he told the agency that “the well-tested technique had been used for centuries
and that the researchers had reached ‘a good estimate’ for Gaza.”
Women,
minors under 18, and the elderly over 65 comprised 59.1% of those killed
militarily, or 28,257 deaths among those for whom sex and age information was
known.
It
should be pointed out that only a small number of military-age men were members
of the paramilitary al-Qassam Brigades or the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, so
that the percentage of innocent civilians among the dead is much higher than
59%.
In
the U.S. Afghanistan war, the Watson Institute at Brown estimated that some
271,000 people were killed, including 71,344 civilians. That would indicate
that 29.6% of those killed were innocent civilians. Over-all, the civilian kill
ratio is most wars is 30% to 50%, so the Israeli military in Gaza is clearly
much more brutal than the norm.
The
researchers found peaks of deaths in the first three months of the Gaza War, in
autumn 2023. This was a time when we know that the Israeli air force dropped
hundreds of 2000-lb. bombs on residential complexes. A United Nations study
found that in many of these attacks, no clear military target was visible.
The
casualties spiked again in June, during the Israeli campaign against Rafah,
which the Biden administration and the International Court of Justice had
forbidden as a red line because it was the last part of the Gaza Strip that
still had the urban infrastructure to keep people alive and healthy. The
Israelis razed it and expelled its inhabitants, many of them being displaced
for a third or fourth time, to already-destroyed neighborhoods in the center.
The
team found that deaths were under-reported by 41% by the Ministry of Health.
Most of the newspaper reporting misunderstood this way of stating the
statistic. What they found was that casualties were 59% more numerous than the
Ministry of Health reported.
The
study only treated deaths from military actions and weaponry (“traumatic”)
deaths. Last July, the Lancet published an estimate that as of that moment,
186,000 Palestinians in Gaza would die over time because of infectious
diseases, exposure, and lack of water and food, as a result of Israeli strategy
and tactics. That number is surely much higher now.
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