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THE WORLD MUST CALCULATE THE REAL GAZA DEATH TOLL  
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Ralph Nader
March 6, 2024
Common Dreams
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_ 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? _

Wounded Palestinians receive treatment at the al-Shifa Hospital,
following Israeli air raids on Gaza City, central Gaza , on October
23, 2023., [Abed Khaled/AP Photo]

 

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
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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.

It matters greatly whether the aggregate toll so far, and counting, is
three, four, five, six times more than the Health Ministry’s
undercount.

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 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 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
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to President Joe Biden on December 13, 2023 by 16 Israeli human rights
groups that also appeared as a paid notice in _The__New York Times_.)

Then came the December 29, 2023 opinion piece in _The Guardian_ by
the chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, Devi
Sridhar. She predicted
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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
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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
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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 [[link removed]].

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% and 99% 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 themselves, 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.

_Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate and the author of "The Seventeen
Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future" (2012). His new book
is, "Wrecking America: How Trump's Lies and Lawbreaking Betray All"
(2020, co-authored with Mark Green)._

* Israel-Gaza War
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* Palestinians
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* War Casualties
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* undercount
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* Ceasefire
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