The fatality figures started to stall in the spring, around the time Israel completed its destruction of Gaza’s hospitals and kidnapped much of the enclave’s medical personnel, writes Jonathan Cook.
Ambulance on Oct. 7, 2023, operated by the Palestine Red Crescent Society in Khan Yunis, Gaza Strip, after it was heavily damaged by an Israeli military airstrike. (Tasnim News Agency, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)
Gaza’s Official Death Toll Is a Lie
By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net
The reported death toll in Gaza is way too low by every imaginable metric. We need to be stressing this — all the more so when Israel’s apologists are vigorously engaged in a disinformation campaign to suggest that the figures are inflated.
On May 6, seven months into Israel’s slaughter, there were reported to be 34,735 dead. That was an average of 4,960 Palestinians killed each month.
Today, nearly three months on, the reported death toll stands at 39,400 — or an increase of 4,665.
It should not need a statistician to point out that, were the rise linear, the expected number of deaths would stand by this point at around 49,600.
So, even by the simplest calculation, there is a large shortfall in deaths — a shortfall that needs explaining.
Such an explanation is easy to provide: Israel destroyed Gaza’s institutions and its medical infrastructure, including its hospitals, many months ago, making it impossible for officials there to keep track of how many Palestinians are being killed by Israel.
The death toll figures started to stall in the spring, around the time Israel completed its destruction of Gaza’s hospitals and kidnapped much of the enclave’s medical personnel.
More than a month ago, Save the Children pointed out that some 21,000 children in Gaza were missing, in addition to the 16,000 known to have been killed by Israel. Many are likely to have suffered lonely, terrifying deaths under rubble — gradually suffocated to death, or dying slowly from dehydration.
But again, even those shocking figures are likely to be a severe undercount.
The linear figure entirely misses the bigger picture. How?
1. Because in addition to the continuing Israeli bombardments, Palestinians have had to endure three more months of an intensifying famine. With each day of a famine, more people die than died the day before.
The deaths in a famine are not linear, they are exponential. If five people died yesterday of starvation, 20 people will die today, and 150 tomorrow. That is how prolonged famines work. The longer you are starved, the higher the probability you will die of starvation.
Israeli minister says that it might be "justified and moral" to starve 2 million Palestinians to death.
Tell me more about how the US-Israel partnership is built on a solid foundation of "shared values."
Washington needs to seriously recalibrate this relationship. pic.twitter.com/6rcTOoeuu4
— Trita Parsi (@tparsi) August 5, 2024
2. Because Palestinians have had three more months deprived of medical care after Israel destroyed their hospitals and medical institutions. If you have a chronic illness — diabetes, asthma, kidney problems, high blood pressure, and so on — the longer you are forced to go without medical attention, the greater the chance you will die from an untreated condition. Again, the death rate in such circumstances is exponential, not linear.
Palestine Red Crescent Society ambulance adamaged by an Israeli airstrike, Oct. 7. (Tasnim News Agency, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)
3. Because without medical care, all sorts of other things that happen in everyday life become more dangerous. Childbirth is the most obvious example, but even cuts and grazes can become a death sentence. So given the fact that Palestinians now have even less access to medical care than they had in the first six months of Israel’s war on Gaza suggests that people are being killed by life-events in even greater numbers than was the case earlier in Israel’s slaughter.
4. Because, for exactly the same reasons, those injured by Israel’s continuing bombardments are likely to have poorer outcomes than those similarly injured in earlier attacks. Fewer doctors means less chance of treatment, means greater chance of dying from your wounds.
5. Because we know that — given the insanitary conditions, the lack of water and food, the weakened health status of the population, and the destruction of hospitals — epidemics now are breaking out. The WHO has already warned of a likely outbreak of polio, but there are sure to be other diseases emerging such as cholera, typhoid and dysentery that have yet to be isolated and identified. Even the common cold can become a killer when people’s health status is this compromised.
?The Palestinian Ministry of Health has declared the Gaza Strip a polio epidemic area ?
We call for an immediate end to the blockade and radical interventions in vaccine + clean water supply, personal hygiene, and sanitation. Demand accountability and action by your gov reps! pic.twitter.com/qxIEq5WjpQ
— The Glia Project (@Glia_Intl) August 3, 2024
A letter from researchers to The Lancet medical journal last month warned about the likely massive undercount of the dead in Gaza, even relying, as they had to, on the established death toll.
Their point was that indirect deaths — of the kind I enumerate above — need to be factored in as well as the direct deaths from Israeli bombs.
They very conservatively estimate that the total number who will die over the coming months — not just from bombs but as a result of the lack of medical care, insanitary conditions and famine — is 186,000, or 8 percent of the population.
But that figure assumes that Israel’s current slaughter and starvation policies come to an immediate halt, and that international organisations are able to bring in emergency aid. There are precisely no signs that Israel is going to allow any of that to happen — or that Western states are going to put any pressure on Israel to do so.
The medical researchers suggest a less conservative estimate could ultimately put the death toll in Gaza nearer 600,000, or a quarter of the population. Again, that assumes Israel reverses course immediately.
Remember too that for every person killed, several others are maimed or badly wounded. According to the current figures, more than 91,000 Palestinians are reported injured, many of them missing limbs. But again, that is likely to be a massive undercount too.
Harrowing as these figures are, they are just numbers. But Gaza’s dead are not numbers. They were human beings, half of them children, whose lives have been snuffed out, their potential erased forever, their loved ones left with an all-consuming grief. Many victims died alone in extreme pain, or endured unimaginable suffering.
None of their lives should be reduced to cold statistics on a graph. But if that is where we are, and sadly it is, then at the very least we need to point out that the headline figures are a lie, that Israel’s barbarism is being grossly minimised, and that we are being lulled into a false sense complacency.
Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years. He returned to the U.K. in 2021.He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict: Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish State (2006), Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (2008) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). If you appreciate his articles, please consider offering your financial support.
This article is from the author’s blog, Jonathan Cook.net.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
The only thing you can conclude at this point is that numbers of deaths reported with such accuracy by Hamas early in the war and current guesses are wrong. It is possible, and probably more likely, that the death numbers first presented by Hamas were insanely too high.
The thing is that lots of videos are coming out of Gaza, they have at least some coverage and I see lots of videos on YouTube and Instagram myself. If the death numbers presented last year were correct and the argument made in this article were correct, there would be 100,000s of injured people, maybe well over 10% of the entire population. It would require a massive act of censorship to keep 10% of a population of more seriously injured not showing up in videos of markets or people walking around Gaza, and in fact Hamas would want to have such images shown out.
So where are these videos showing crowds where 1 in 10 or 1 in 5 are injured recently? Where are the videos of thousands of untreated people?
According to Gregory Stanton, the founding president of Genocide Watch, Stage 10 of genocide is DENIAL. Stanton also indicated that denial “is among the surest indicators of further genocidal massacres”.
Thanks for exposing yourself, Bob. You’re part of the problem.
Ah but here in the good ‘ol US of A, we can easily avert our eyes. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. I ask: how is that possible? Would we have averted our eyes, say, 80-some years ago? No. We did not. We confronted the genocide then and many American GIs gave their lives to stop it. Now, the only difference is that instead of stopping a genocide, our leaders are now funding and arming it.
Anyone that accepts the current status quo in American politics, where the US government directly funds and arms this barbarism, is morally corrupt.
And the Christian message asserting the universal
likeness of all human beings and the command to
love the neighbor– while our elected leaders
applaud genocidal slaughter with alacrity– but
how long will a God of love allow such mockery?
Israel and the U.S. criminal governments should not be allowed to pursue this genocide. If the U.N. won’t take the lead (don’t bother mentioning that it would need to bypass its Security Council vetos) then a coalition of the willing should do the job of destroying Israel’s capacity to continue this behavior. If the U.S. and/or others interfere with this then a suitable coalition should destroy their capacity to do so (which it has the capacity to do).
The world should refuse to be held hostage by these international criminal psychopaths and destroy them if that’s what it takes. The observation ‘enough is enough’ properly reflects the current situation.
Great article as usual from Mr. Cook, thank you. Yes a false sense of complacency, but I would say worse than that: the Anglo-sphere governments and MassMedia either ignore the facts, distorts them, or repeats outright lies. In the UK and US, the two main political parties support genocide, cheap rhetoric aside. Millions of US dwellers will go to the polls in a few months time, and will vote for one of two candidates, both of whom will continue funding, arming, and enabling genocide and provoking more war with nuclear powers, cheap rhetoric aside. As horrific as this situation is, it will continue because the only choice on the ballot is “Genocidal Oligarchy Blue, or Genocidal Oligarchy Red.
I would like to see a mass demonstration on election day, with a list of demands like: Stop the Genocide Now, No war with Iran, China, Russia! Stop the Siege Warfare of Cuba, Venezuela, Healthcare Crisis! Housing Crisis! Climate Crisis! or something to list the hardcore issues that are largely ignored by the oligarchy-owned MassMediaCartel.
I like the idea…I, too, would love to join such a rising. If only!
Instead, I think that at this particular stage, we’re more likely to see a return of Elvis and the Beatles, then any such mass rising. The public has been for too-long dumbed down by comfort and the self-interested pursuit of same, and the decades of mass propaganda emanating from the managers of the Empire and their amplifiers in corporate media.