By Ralph Nader
March 28, 2025
The
vast undercount of Israeli-caused deaths in Gaza is regularly reported
as 50,000. The actual toll from violent military action and the indirect
deaths (stemming from infectious disease, epidemics, untreated chronic
illness, untreated serious wounds, and starvation) is well over 400,000
and growing by the day.
No
crowded enclave like Gaza – the geographical size of Philadelphia –
with 2.3 million people under a long-term siege blocking essentials can
withstand over 115 thousand tons of bombs, plus artillery, grenades, and
snipers targeting civilians, with uncontrollable fires everywhere. How
could 97.5% of its inhabitants survive? Tens of thousands of Palestinian
children, women, and men lie under the rubble. Tens of thousands of
diabetics and cancer victims have no medicine. Five thousand babies a
month are born into the rubble.
As
declared by the Israeli war ministries, “no food, water, medicine,
electricity and fuel,” the words of genocide or mass murder of utterly
defenseless civilians who had nothing to do with October 7, 2023 — hikes
the ratio of “indirect deaths” to the higher range of three to
fifteen-fold by the Geneva Declaration Secretariat’s review of prior
conflicts.
In my lengthy article, published in the Capitol Hill Citizen,
(August/September 2024 issue) I noted that the total ban by Netanyahu
of foreign and Israeli reporters from entering the killing fields of
Gaza allows the undercount by Hamas to be the anchor on the lethal
truth. Hamas counts only names of the deceased given by hospitals and
mortuaries, which were largely destroyed many months ago. Hamas, like
Netanyahu, favors an undercount for obviously different reasons – the
former to lessen the ire of its people for not protecting them and the
latter to diminish international sanctions and condemnation.
It
is not as if there are no higher estimates by credible groups. UN
agencies, international aid groups, and specialists in disaster
casualties at places like Brown University and the University of
Edinburgh, and reports in the prestigious medical journal LANCETall
point to a major undercount. They cite minimum reasonable estimates.
But the mass media just keeps citing the Hamas undercount, awaiting some
magical number that meets an impossible level of precision.
Interestingly,
the mass media has no problem reporting estimates of deaths under the
Syrian Assad dictatorship, during the Sudanese conflict, or the Russian
war on Ukraine. It seems only the Palestinians are not allowed to live
by the Israeli/U.S. terrorist regimes and are not told how many of them
are being annihilated. Imagine, whole extended families in apartment
buildings and tents.
More
curious is why the so-called Left, in their denunciations, are still
clinging to the Hamas figure. A famous commentator from Haaretz and a civic leader in the U.S. gave me the same answer. The Hamas figures are horrific enough!
Can you imagine Israeli governments undercounting their fatalities by nearly 90%?
More
curious is what is keeping the few strong defenders of Palestinian
survival in Congress from asking the Congressional Research Service of
the Library of Congress to come up with a minimum accurate figure from
the available empirical and clinical evidence?
What
kept the majority of Democrats in the Senate under Biden from
subpoenaing the evidence accumulated by the State Department on the
death/injury count? The State Department has been resisting our Freedom
of Information request since May 23, 2024. What about tapping into the
work of sixteen Israeli human rights groups, including the military
reservist groups like “Breaking the Silence”?
Numbers
matter in wars and natural disasters. They matter in the intensity
behind the civic, political, and diplomatic efforts worldwide to stop
the killing, secure a permanent ceasefire, let in the thousands of
trucks bearing humanitarian aid (food, water, medicine, fuel, and other
essentials), and enter into serious peace negotiations.
Instead,
Trump is backing the expulsion of the Palestinian survivors, supporting
the annexation of the West Bank, and leaving devastated Gaza as a real
estate opportunity for Israeli and American developers.
This
attitude is what Jim Zogby (founder of the Arab-American Institute)
exposed when years ago he delivered a lecture on “The Other
Anti-Semitism” before an Israeli University audience. The other
antisemitism, exhibited by Biden and Trump, is backed by F-16s and other
weapons of mass destruction that have killed over 100,000 children
along with their mothers, fathers, grandmothers, and grandfathers.
A
deep racism backed by a genocidal delivery system day after day is
funded by American tax dollars delivered by a homicidal Congress. A
Congress that has refused, since 1948, testimony by leading Israeli and
Palestinian peace advocates before House and Senate Committees to
provide justice for the Palestinian people.
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