Official death toll in Gaza now 40,000; when will the world says NO!
JVL Introduction
The official death figure in Gaza has passed 40,000; Israel claims this is an exaggeration and that it includes Hamas fighters and operatives. However, many believe that the death toll is higher (see eg in Ha’aretz late May 2024)/ The number of seriously injured children and adult civilians is horrendous and in addition that there will be many more deaths from disease and starvation as well as from bombs and gunshots (as pointed out, eg in a letter to the Lancet in June 2024 letter in The Lancet, (June 2024) Doctors returning from stints in Gaza come back shocked and horrified saying that decades of experience with disasters and wars in many countries has not, for example, prepared them for the huge numbers of children who have been killed, sustained life changing wounds and been orphaned. A new acronym was invented to account just for this onslaught on Gaza WCNSF – Wounded Child No Surviving Family.
Ha’aretz makes some comparisons with other wars and ethnic cleansing, eg in former Yugoslavia and even when numbers are high and percentages similar the incredibly short time period to reach these figures in Gaza is staggering. There are, of course, heinous conflicts in other parts of the world where the number and percentage of the targeted population killed is also high but not referenced here, for example, Rwanda, Darfur and Congo and, of course, the Iraqi Kurds. A key difference worth noting is that in most of these other example, the west imposed sanctions or at least was not supplying weapons; this is different as the USA and the UK (among others) continue to supply weapons to Israel. We must remember that under the Genocide Convention, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions are required by States where there is a risk of or actual genocide.
We welcome the strong statement from the British government to the UN Security Council: Palestinians have nowhere safe to turn but it is past time not only for arms sales but also normal trading to stop, at least until Israel stops the killing.
LL
This article was originally published by Ha'aretz on Wed 14 Aug 2024. Read the original here.
The Numbers Show: Gaza War Is One of the Bloodiest in the 21st Century
As the Gaza death toll approaches 40,000, Haaretz examines the data from a global perspective. The rate and pace of deaths – as well as the living conditions of those still alive – overshadow the conflicts in Iraq, Ukraine and Myanmar
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Genocide of the indigenous people follows Israel being supported, protected, funded and armed through really counterproductive hypocritical political fixes.
To get a better comparison between the death rates in different wars, the article gives deaths in relation to population size, and also as the number per month. It’s revealing to compare the four wars by combining both factors – monthly deaths per million people:
Iraq 30 (deaths per million people, per month)
Gaza 1900
Ukraine 240
Syria 295.
(And of course, the Gaza figure is the average figure throughout the whole war, whereas for the other three it’s from the worst year of those longer conflicts.)
This is the US / Israeli genocide, and the figures for deaths are increasing by the minute. The Lancet recently estimated over 100,000 deaths, with thousands still missing or under the rubble.
As I have come to see it, the most effective way of “engineering consent” has proven to be about the setting up of scapegoats. Deploying Palestinians and anyone who supports them as such massively benefits the elites whose profitable enormities have spanned back through COVID corruption, Brexit, 2008, the various phases of the Iraq horrors and beyond. We, could, however try to change the conversation. One small example – demos outside supermarkets that have had leveraged buyouts might help. The statistics on where people’s money is going (dividends and interest payments) are as simple as they are appalling. Whilst the spotlight is on the chosen scapegoats the ill informed will just get more enraged as prescribed, bigotry racism and supremacism will become more normalised, and Zionism in it’s most extreme and accelerated form will not only get a free pass, others may seek to emulate. Greed begets cruelty.