Back in early March when the Israel/Gaza conflict was still in its fifth month, longtime progressive icon Ralph Nader published an important column in Common Dreams arguing that the official Palestinian death toll widely cited in media reports probably represented a huge underestimate of the actual reality.
His piece opened as follows:
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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 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.
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.
Nader’s piece originally appeared under the explosive headline “How Many Gazans Have Already Died? Perhaps 200,000.” But apparently an editor later changed the title to something much less inflammatory.
- The World Must Calculate the Real Gaza Death Toll
Ralph Nader • Common Dreams • March 6, 2024 • 1,200 Words
At the time I read it, I thought Nader’s speculative figure of 200,000 Gazan deaths seemed far too high, but the basic point he was making was a very reasonable one. The official body count regularly provided by Gaza’s Public Health Ministry seemed restricted only to those directly killed by Israeli bombs or bullets, excluding the considerable number of Gazans whose cause of death was far more ambiguously connected to the Israeli military campaign. Given the overwhelmingly lockstep pro-Israel skew of the Western global media, that sort of extreme caution was certainly necessary in any public releases, but it must have greatly understated the true civilian death-toll from the conflict.
Nader quoted an article published a few days earlier by a Washington Post reporter that had emphasized the horrific conditions and risk of serious famine.
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. 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.
Nader quoted numerous other international officials and relief experts who broadly supported this same analysis, notably including UN Secretary-General António Guterres, while also noting that as far back as late 2023, the chair of public health at the University of Edinburgh had predicted that a half-million Gazans might die during 2024 if conditions continued unabated.
Nader’s provocative column received relatively little attention at the time even in alternative media circles, perhaps because most regarded his conclusions as so wildly implausible. But he now seems to have been completely vindicated as The Lancet, one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious medical journals, published a short piece estimating the total death toll from Israel’s nine month destruction of Gaza. The three authors argued that the figure would probably exceed 186,000.
- Counting the dead in Gaza: difficult but essential
Rasha Khatib, Martin McKee, and Salim Yusuf • The Lancet • July 5, 2024 • 1,100 Words
The article emphasized that across a wide range of previous conflicts, indirect deaths have always greatly exceeded direct ones, with the ratio generally being between 3 and 15. We would certainly expect this to be the case in Gaza, given that Israelis have destroyed nearly all of Gaza’s hospitals and the bulk of its housing stock, while also inflicting famine conditions upon the suffering population. So the authors applied a conservative ratio of 4 for illustrative purposes, thus producing their estimate of 186,000 total deaths, but the true figure might easily be much higher. In a recent interview, the eminent political scientist John Mearsheimer certainly accepted this analytical framework, and indeed felt that total might be too low.
Moreover, even the direct toll of deaths may have become a serious undercount, as I had argued in May:
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Although the official Gazan death-toll reported in our media has remained relatively constant in recent weeks, this is almost certainly an illusion. During the first month or two of the massive Israeli attack, the Gazan Public Health Ministry had maintained very detailed rosters of the dead, including the names, ages, and ID codes of the victims, and regularly released updates of the total, so those numbers seemed absolutely solid. But the Israeli assault soon targeted all of Gaza’s government offices and hospitals, and by early December, the Gazan officials responsible for tabulating the dead had themselves been killed or gone missing, so the count naturally tended to stagnate, even as conditions horrifically worsened for the surviving Gazans.
After less than three months of the Israeli slaughter, some 22,000 Gazans had officially been reported dead, but now after more than seven months of starvation and continuing attacks, including the destruction of all of Gaza’s hospitals and medical facilities, the official body-count reported in our media has only increased to around 34,000, which seems highly implausible…
A recent front-page story in the New York Times reported the tragic case of a particular Palestinian-American pharmacist living in New Jersey, who had personally lost 200 relatives killed in Gaza, including his parents and siblings. That single datapoint indicated the magnitude of the possible media under-count after seven months of horror, and Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia suggested something similar in a recent interview. Although solid estimates are impossible, I’d think a civilian death toll of 100,000 or even something considerably higher seems perfectly plausible at this date.
- Israel/Gaza: The Masks Come Off in American Society
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • May 6, 2024 • 6,800 Words
These very large death-tolls originally suggested by Nader and now endorsed in the Lancet may shock many readers, but such skeptical reactions are unwarranted. After just a few weeks of the Israeli assault, the Financial Times had calculated that the level of destruction inflicted upon much of densely-populated Gaza was already worse than what had been suffered by many German cities following years of the Allied strategic bombing campaign during World War II:
The catastrophic destruction of northern Gaza in less than seven weeks has approached that caused by the years-long carpet-bombing of German cities during the second world war https://t.co/Hm0YiTNOjr pic.twitter.com/vC3Nx3BP5X
— Financial Times (@FT) December 7, 2023
Moreover, such mass slaughter of Gazan civilians was the obvious, declared intent of the Israeli government. In late December, South Africa filed a 91 page legal brief with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) heavily documenting Israel’s publicly avowed plans for genocide, and within weeks, the ICJ jurists had issued a series of near-unanimous rulings supporting those charges. Given that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly identified the Palestinians with the biblical tribe of Amalek, whom the Hebrew god commanded be exterminated down to the last newborn baby, and so many other senior Israeli leaders have issued similar pronouncements, we should hardly be surprised that more than nine months of relentless bombing and shelling have successfully accomplished at least a portion of that stated goal.
