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In the Public Interest
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Stop Repeating the Vast Undercount of Gazan Deaths. It Is Ten Times Greater.
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By Ralph Nader
February 21, 2025
Enough already of the media’s lazy indifference to the vast undercount of the
Palestinian death toll from Netanyahu’s genocidal daily bombing and shelling of
Gaza’s defenseless civilian population. I’m referring to all the media – the
corporate media, the public media, and the independent media. They all stick
with the Hamas Ministry of Health’s (MOH) count of named victims whose corpses
have been identified by hospitals and mortuaries. For months there have been no
operating hospitals and mortuaries to send their grisly data to the Health
Ministry.
The official Hamas count that all sides like to cite is now over 48,000 deaths.
As American doctors back from Gaza before the Rafah closing last year said—just
about everybody surviving in Gaza is sick, injured, or dying. They put the
death estimate almost a year ago at a minimum of 95,000, not counting tens of
thousands of families buried under the rubble when Israeli F-16s blew up entire
apartment buildings.
Why would all sides to this one-sided Israeli war of extermination rely on
Hamas’ figures? Well, Hamas has an interest in low-balling the number of deaths
to limit the rage of its inhabitants and allies abroad for not protecting the
people of Gaza and not providing them with shelters. The Israeli super-hawks
want to keep the undercount low to dampen down the international rage,
boycotts, and demand for more sanctions and ICC prosecutions. The Biden
administration and now the Trump regime also benefit from a low number.
Here is the Washington Post’s esteemed foreign affairs editor Karen DeYoung’s
reply on September 6, 2024 to my inquiry:
“We use the Gaza MOH [Ministry of Health] figures – as does the United Nations,
World Health Organization and virtually every other humanitarian organization –
while noting that independent media are not allowed to enter Gaza and the
casualty counts are most certainly underreported… The Lancet [British Medical
Journal] report notes that based on other ‘recent conflicts…it is not
implausible to estimate’ that four times as many have died than those listed by
the MOH…The time will come, I believe, when an independent accounting can be
done.”
But six months later the time still hasn’t come. The Biden State Department had
a much higher estimate of deaths but refused to release their analysis,
obstructing our Freedom of Information request filed last May 24, 2024. All
kinds of estimates and projections by reputable universities, specialists,
global health groups and UN agencies point to a much higher death and overall
casualty toll. But the State Department won’t come forward with a reasonably
estimated number that can replace Hamas’ statistical immolation.
For example, in late 2023, the chair of Global Public Health at the University
of Edinburgh—Professor Devi Sridhar—said that if the destruction continues,
half a million Palestinians would die in 2024. The devastation has gotten
worse—the bombings, the genocidal denial of “food, water, medicine,
electricity, fuel” in the omnicidal words of the high Israeli military
officials, the spread of diseases, untreated injuries, babies born into the
rubble, infants starved, lack of potable water, sick elderly without critical
medicines, and more. This is the result of 110 thousand tons of bombs (Israeli
admission) daily tank shelling and precise destructions. Yet neither she nor
most other experts who have projected continuing mayhem have offered a number.
Interestingly, the media has no trouble estimating the Syrian deaths at the
hands of dictator Assad (500,000) nor the deaths in the wars in Sudan or
Ukraine. Only the Palestinians, who are not allowed to live, don’t get the
respect of having their deaths accurately estimated. One team of Gazan
undertakers said they buried 17,000 bodies in mass graves by February 2024,
including 800 in one day.
Were the shoe on the other foot, Congress would not only have had intense
public hearings: it would have declared war against Hamas. With total U.S.
co-belligerency – from huge weapons supplies to the veto at the UN, Netanyahu
gets away with blocking Israeli and all other reporters from going freely into
Gaza, and shuts up those conscience-stricken Israeli soldiers who are sickened
by what they were ordered to destroy. One of them said, “I felt like, like,
like a Nazi … it looked exactly like we were actually the Nazis and they were
the Jews.”
Some columnists in the U.S. like Charles Lane and Ruth Marcus of the Washington
Post and Netanyahu’s mouthpiece, Bret Stephens of the New York Times, do not
believe the Israeli military consciously targets civilians and civilian
infrastructure. Israelis scoff at such naivete; many want more annihilation of
all Palestinians whom they regard as “subhuman,” “vermin,” “snakes,” or
“animals” (racist words from high Israeli politicians over the decades).
Some 45 years ago, former UN Ambassador and Foreign Minister Abba Eban —under
then Prime Minister Menachem Begin—wrote that Israel “is wantonly inflicting
every possible measure of death and anguish on civilian populations in a mood
reminiscent of regimes which neither Mr. Begin nor I would dare to mention by
name.”
In August 2024, based on available historical, empirical, and clinical records,
we estimated about 300,000 Palestinians had been killed. (See the
August/September 2024 issue of the Capitol Hill Citizen). By now it is over
400,000. Yet the media still uses the figure by Hamas and ignores the lives
blown apart under the killing fields in Gaza.
At 400,000 and growing, far more Palestinians have been killed in Gaza than the
combined total of deaths from Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden in World War II.
This week, Netanyahu dropped leaflets in Arabic signaling a forthcoming violent
exclusion of Gaza’s trapped, unsheltered Palestinians from their homeland. More
accurately estimated civilian casualties matters morally and for the intensity
of the political, diplomatic, and civic resistance when the world learns the
truer toll of death and injuries in this tiny enclave the geographical size of
Philadelphia.
To remind the world of the daily Israeli violations of settled international
law inflicted on Gazans (also in the West Bank and Lebanon), international law
practitioner Bruce Fein compiled this concise list:
ISRAEL’S TEN VIOLATIONS OF INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL HUMANITARIAN LAW IN GAZA
- Genocide Count I. Killing Palestinians in Gaza.
- Genocide Count II. Deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza
conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole
or in part.
- Genocide Count III. Destroying hospitals and maternal care necessities
intended to prevent births by Palestinian women in Gaza.
- Crimes against humanity. Extermination and persecution of 2.3 million
Palestinians in Gaza as part of a systematic attack directed at Palestinian
civilians.
- Deliberately targeting civilians and civilian property for destruction.
- Failing to provide for the security and welfare of the inhabitants
occupied by the Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza.
- Impeding delivery of humanitarian assistance.
- Forcible relocation of civilian population.
- Use of military force causing civilian casualties vastly disproportionate
to the importance of any legitimate military objective.
- War of aggression against Gaza Palestinians.
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