Jonathan Cook: Israel’s Biggest Con

Israel has created a false death toll debate that relates only to those who were killed directly by its bombs and gunfire — not the genocide it is waging by other means.

By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net

The biggest con trick Israel has managed to pull off over the past two years is imposing entirely phoney parameters on a “debate” in the West about the credibility of the death toll in Gaza, now officially standing at just over 70,000.

It is not just that we have been endlessly bogged down in rows about whether Gaza’s medical authorities can be trusted, or how many of the dead are Hamas fighters. (Despite Israeli disinformation campaigns, the Israeli military itself believes more than 80 per cent of the dead are civilians.)

Or even that these “debates” always ignore the fact that, early on, Israel wrecked Gaza’s capacity to count its dead by destroying the enclave’s governmental offices and its hospitals. The 70,000 figure is likely to be a drastic under-estimate.

No, the biggest con trick is that Israel has successfully penned us all into a “debate,” one entirely divorced from reality, that relates only to those killed directly by its bombs and gunfire.

The truth is that far, far larger numbers of people in Gaza have been actively killed by Israel not through these direct means but through what statisticians refer to as “indirect” methods.

These people were killed by Israel destroying their homes and leaving them with no shelter. By Israel destroying their water and electricity supplies and their sanitation systems. By Israel levelling their hospitals. By Israel starving them. By Israel creating the perfect conditions for disease to spread. The list of ways Israel is killing people in Gaza goes on and on.

Imagine your own societies levelled in the way Gaza has been.

How long would your elderly parents survive in this hellscape?

How well would your diabetic child fare, or your sister with asthma, or your brother with cancer?

How well would you cope with catching pneumonia, or even a common cold, if you hadn’t had more than one small meal a day for months on end?

How would your wife deal with a difficult childbirth if there were no anaesthetics, or no hospital nearby, or a barely functioning hospital overwhelmed with victims from Israel’s latest bombing run.

And what would be the chances of your baby surviving if its mother could produce no milk from her starvation diet? And if you could not give the baby formula feed because Israel was blocking supplies from entry into the enclave? And if, anyway, the contaminated water supply could not be mixed into the formula powder?

None of these kinds of deaths are included in the figure of 70,000. And all precedents show that many, many times more people are killed through these indirect methods than directly through fatal injuries from bombs and bullets.

According to a letter from experts in this field to The Lancet, studies of other wars — most of them far less destructive than Israel’s on the tiny enclave — indicate that between three and 15 times more people are killed by indirect, rather than direct, methods of warfare.

The authors conservatively estimate an indirect death toll four times greater than the direct death toll. That would mean, at a minimum, 280,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza through Israel’s actions.

The reality is likely to be even worse. That is without even mentioning the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have been left with horrific injuries and psychological trauma.

Israel’s war planners know exactly how this direct-to-indirect ratio works. Which is why they chose to destroy nearly every home in Gaza, to bomb the power, sanitation and water facilities, to level the hospitals, and to block aid month after month.

They knew this would be the way Israel could carry out a genocide while offering its allies — Western governments and its army of lobbyists — a “get out of jail card” for their active complicity.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s so-called ceasefire is just another layer of deception in this endless game of smoke and mirrors. The U.N.’s child protection agency, Unicef, reports that less than a quarter of aid trucks are getting into Gaza past Israel’s continuing starvation blockade, despite Israeli commitments agreed as part of the “ceasefire.” Apparently, this doesn’t register as a gross ceasefire violation. It goes unnoticed.

Unicef reports further that in October alone, at the start of the “ceasefire,” nearly 18,000 new mothers and babies had to be hospitalised in Gaza from acute malnutrition.

The genocide isn’t over. Israel may have slowed the rate of direct killings it is committing by bombing Gaza, but the indirect killings continue unabated. And so does the Israeli-engineered “debate” in the West, one designed to obscure and excuse the mass murder of Gaza’s population.

CORRECTION: The figure of 350,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza through Israel’s actions being four times the official toll of 70,000 has been corrected to 280,000.

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.