The Scope and Denial of the Gaza Genocide
The raw numbers about the devastation in Gaza almost certainly understate the severity of the destruction, yet even this conservative estimate is under constant assault from genocide deniers.
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There are many things that are shameful, even obscene in the ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip. Among the most grotesque of these is the rampant denialism of the realities of Gaza in the West.
Attempting to combat this effort, I, like many others, have consistently noted that the figures often cited from Gaza’s Ministry of Health (MoH) are likely a severe undercount, as they do not count the thousands of people missing and buried under rubble. Nor do they include the far greater number of people who die from malnutrition, curable diseases, infections, thirst, and other by-products of the kind of destruction that all-out military assaults always bring with them, and which are even more severe given the destruction and the lack of outside assistance in Gaza.
Now, an important, albeit brief, article in the medical journal, The Lancet sheds horrifying light on what the real death toll in Gaza may be.
Fighting genocide denial
One of the crucial steps Israel and its enablers in the United States and Europe have taken to deny the genocide in Gaza has been the degrading of the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza. From the lowliest troll on Twitter all the way up to the President of the United States, doubt and aspersions have been cast on the reliability of the data the MoH has produced.
After bluntly stating that the data is falsified, exaggerated, or unreliable, these forces simply use the shorthand of referring to it as the “Hamas-run Ministry of Health,” implying that Hamas is the one producing the statistics, dishonestly, for purposes of their own. Of course, the entire administrative apparatus of Gaza was, before October 7, under Hamas’ authority, with the support of the Israeli government.
Yet, aside from the shade cast at it, there is no reason to doubt the accuracy of the MoH data. In fact, a senior Israeli official told the Israeli news site Mekomit, “The secret services looked at the (Gaza) health ministry’s collection methods and determined the numbers were generally credible, so instead of collecting their own information they decided to use the [Hamas] numbers…There’s no possibility of collecting exact data in this situation but their system is generally transparent and credible.”
Simply by calling the MoH “Hamas-run,” the Israeli and American governments and their mouthpieces have managed to cast doubt on reliable figures, while Israel itself continues to use them internally because they know that they are honestly derived, even if the MoH is no longer capable of the rigor it once was able to employ. Hamas doesn’t influence the figures and no evidence to the contrary has been produced, only innuendo.
Yet the reality is that the MoH is as decimated as the rest of Gaza. Instead of pretending that they can function normally, the MoH has noted those figures it can identify positively and those it cannot because, as the Lancet piece points out, “Collecting data is becoming increasingly difficult for the Gaza Health Ministry due to the destruction of much of the infrastructure.”
The cynical attempts by genocide deniers to use this diligence on the MoH’s part as evidence that they have been fudging their numbers from the beginning was both shameless and transparent, leading to its general failure to convince anyone but the already convinced.
Indeed, the contrary is true; the diligence with which the MoH accumulates its statistics leads to a drastic understatement of the devastation in Gaza. They can only report the deaths they can confirm either direct identification or less directly through reliable media sources and first responders, which they have to vet for accuracy.
This means the numbers are conservative, don’t include the missing or buried, and rely, even for direct identification, on services that are crippled and strained. That’s why I and many others repeat that the death toll is almost certainly a drastic undercount, even if we only discuss deaths by Israeli fire and bombings.
The true death toll
In any war, it is the secondary causes of death that really drive the totals up. In the case of Gaza, in addition to the usual harm to infrastructure, supplies of medication and food, and other disruptions of normal life, we must add the intentional starvation and total blockade that Israel immediately imposed on Gaza on October 7.
On October 8, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant bluntly stated, “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” Thise “human animals” included everyone living in Gaza, as everyone, not just Hamas or other fighters, would be affected equally by these measures.
Moreover, while health, community, religious, and sheltering infrastructure and buildings are commonly damaged or destroyed as a by-product of war, in Gaza, Israel intentionally targeted such sites from the start. That targeting of civilian infrastructure, and indeed, civilians themselves, continues to this day.
That drives up the numbers of dead and injured. And this is where the Lancet article sheds its light. The authors say that in other conflicts deaths from indirect causes like hunger, thirst, curable disease, and other factors been shown to kill from three to fifteen times as many people as the bombs and bullets.
Here, we need to pause for some clarification. The authors suggest that, using a conservative estimate of four times the number of currently reported deaths, that could mean “…it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.”
They seem to arrive at the 186,000 figure by including an approximation of 10,000 missing or buried victims, which is also a conservative estimate, and multiplying by four. This has been reported by many well-meaning people as being a guess of the current death toll. The writers unfortunately are unclear in their expression here, but if you read carefully, you see that what they are saying is that if the killing stops now, 186,000 is a conservative estimate of the number of deaths that would eventually be attributable to Israel’s actions so far, not that this many have died as of now. That number is, as Omar Baddar put it, a “forward-looking figure.”
But the conservative estimate using only four times the number of reported deaths is overly generous when we consider the circumstances. Not only do we have one of the world’s most advanced militaries deliberately trying to destroy Gaza’s and deliberately starving the population, but this is also a population already hampered by a siege of seventeen years in one of the most overcrowded areas of the world. Those conditions led to a severe shortage of medical supplies, brought water-borne diseases to dangerous levels, and made clean water a rare commodity long before October 7. This population was even more vulnerable than other poor regions.
In that context, the true death toll of Israel’s genocidal campaign could already have reached 186,000 with an even greater figure to come even if a ceasefire is reached and implemented right now.
Telling the truth about genocide is “antisemitism”
Unsurprisingly, the Jerusalem Post reported on the Lancet piece by calling it a “blood libel,” a phrase that has become so overused to cry wolf in defense of Israel that if a real case of blood libel ever does come around again, no one will believe it.
Another anti-Palestinian publication, the UK’s Jewish Chronicle decided to imply that one of the authors, Rasha Khatib, has nefarious motives in writing the piece. Khatib teaches at Birzeit University in the West Bank and, unsurprisingly, has little love for Israel’s occupation and violence.
The substance of Prof. Khatib’s “anti-Israel bias” is allegedly provided by a post she wrote on Facebook in 2014 while Israel was pounding Gaza: “Palestinian violence is the inevitable response to… occupation and apartheid-like inequality. Violence therefore will only end when the occupation and Israeli apartheid end”.
This hardly seems like a radical post for a woman watching the military that occupies her land killing her fellow Palestinians. But of course, she works at Birzeit, which, the same article points out made the “outrageous” call at the start of Israel’s current genocide for academic institutions to “…take concrete action to stop the genocidal war on the Palestinian people and to end Israeli settler colonialism.” Again, hardly radical words.
The JC article preferred not to dwell on the fact that another of the authors, Martin McKee, is on the international advisory board at the Israel National Institute For Health Policy Research, used to lecture at Hebrew University, and is a world-renowned medical researcher.
But these attacks are just what one would expect. And, yes, the numbers are speculative, albeit very conservatively speculative.
But consider, as the official death toll in Gaza approaches 40,000, how horrifying that toll already is. It barely scratches the surface of the devastation, though. The 10,000, at least, who are missing or buried under the rubble, and the untold number who have died from the conditions Israel intentionally imposed on them.
When this horror is over, we will begin to unearth the reality of what Israel has done in a comprehensive way. It will be much more appalling than it already seems to be. And the forces of denialism will make every effort to tell the world that what has clearly happened didn’t really happen. Pathetically, defenders of Israel have learned well from Holocaust deniers, and have not only emulated them, but have upped their game significantly. But, like other historical genocides, the magnitude of this crime will be too great to hide for long.
News Roundup
On the Record with Hamas
By Jeremy Scahill, Dropsite News, July 9, 2024
A Surprise Win by an Iranian Reformist
By Bob Dreyfuss, The Nation, July 9, 2024
US: Pro-Palestine protestors are being 'influenced' by Iran, intelligence chief claims
Middle East Eye, July 10, 2024
IDF Ordered Hannibal Directive on October 7 to Prevent Hamas Taking Soldiers Captive
By Yaniv Kubovich, Haaretz, July 7, 2024
Israel ordered thousands to ‘safe’ areas in Gaza City — then bombed them
By Mahmoud Mushtaha, +972 Magazine, July 10, 2024
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I just finished reading the article in The Lancet and remain horrified beyond words. And so appreciate the rest of your posting.
The Jerusalem Post smear that it is a "blood libel" is so out of touch with reality. To quote from a book review in the Nation Magazine that digs deep into the history of the blood libel accusation, here is a good definition of it: ".... the blood libel: the claim that Jews murder Christian children, often around Easter, and use their blood in Passover rituals." That Israeli writers and politicians try to say that any critique of their actions is a "blood libel" is a total fabrication....but of course it sounds good and that's why they do it.