MORE DESTRUCTIVE THAN 6 HIROSHIMAS. The vast undercount of Israeli-caused deaths in Gaza is regularly reported as 67,000. The actual toll from violent military action and the indirect deaths (stemming from infectious disease, epidemics, untreated chronic illness, untreated serious wounds, and starvation) is probably over 1 million and growing by the day.
According to Ralph Nader, No crowded enclave like Gaza – the geographical size of Philadelphia – with 2.3 million people under a long-term siege blocking essentials can withstand over 115 thousand tons of bombs, plus artillery, grenades, and snipers targeting civilians, with uncontrollable fires everywhere. How could 97.5% of its inhabitants survive? Tens of thousands of Palestinian children, women, and men lie under the rubble. Tens of thousands of diabetics and cancer victims have no medicine. Five thousand babies a month are born into the rubble.
As declared by the Israeli war ministries, “no food, water, medicine, electricity and fuel,” the words of genocide or mass murder of utterly defenseless civilians who had nothing to do with October 7, 2023 — hikes the ratio of “indirect deaths” to the higher range of three to fifteen-fold by the Geneva Declaration Secretariat’s review of prior conflicts. [MORE]
Nader explains, Since the Hamas raid penetrated the multi-tiered Israeli border security on October 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 115,000 tons of bombs/missiles plus non-stop tank shelling and snipers.
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 67,000? With five thousand 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.
Netanyahu and Hamas, which he helped over the years, have a common interest in lowballing the death/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.
In my lengthy article, published in the Capitol Hill Citizen, (August/September 2024 issue) I noted that the total ban by Netanyahu of foreign and Israeli reporters from entering the killing fields of Gaza allows the undercount by Hamas to be the anchor on the lethal truth. Hamas counts only names of the deceased given by hospitals and mortuaries, which were largely destroyed many months ago. Hamas, like Netanyahu, favors an undercount for obviously different reasons – the former to lessen the ire of its people for not protecting them and the latter to diminish international sanctions and condemnation.The Health Ministry is intentionally conservative, citing that its death toll came from reports only of named 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.
It is not as if there are no higher estimates by credible groups. UN agencies, international aid groups, and specialists in disaster casualties at places like Brown University and the University of Edinburgh, and reports in the prestigious medical journal LANCET all point to a major undercount. They cite minimum reasonable estimates. But the mass media just keeps citing the Hamas undercount, awaiting some magical number that meets an impossible level of precision. [MORE]
It was especially astonishing to see the most progressive groups and writers routinely use the same Hamas Health Ministry figures 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 October 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 Biden on December 13, 2023, by 16 Israeli human rights groups that also appeared as a paid notice in the New York Times.)
In thousands of news articles, there is the same exact obligatory reference, to wit: “More than X number of Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the war began according to the Hamas Ministry of Health.” That severe undercount becomes the reported casualty figure despite the Israeli unchallenged, daily demolition bombing of Gaza.
As a result, unlike other armed conflicts in the world, the vast undercount of fatalities and injuries in Gaza is a vastly underreported story. Coming to more accurate estimates would affect the intensity of the political, diplomatic, and civic pressures for a ceasefire. It would also prompt more strenuous calls for immediate humanitarian aid, an immediate ceasefire, and peace negotiations.