Heartless In Gaza

The great Statistics Propaganda War is on, in Gaza; having devastated Gaza City with an area bombing campaign that began within hours of the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, pro-Israeli militarist PR shills are now casting doubt on the proportion of civilian casualties to combatant casualties.

Heated debates over the Palestinian death toll in the Hamas-Israel war tend to focus on the fact that widely cited fatality numbers make no distinction between combatants and noncombatants. While this is true, it misses a more fundamental problem—the numbers themselves have lost any claim to validity.

In the first month of the war, the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health (MOH) in Gaza relied on its existing collection system, made up primarily of hospitals and morgues, to certify each death. Starting in early November, however, hospitals in northern Gaza began to shut down or evacuate during the Israeli ground invasion, spurring the MOH to introduce a new, undefined methodology for counting fatalities: media reports. This methodology, which the MOH has rarely acknowledged publicly, accounts for the majority of fatalities reported over the past four months, surpassing the traditional collection system…

“Hospitals in northern Gaza began to shut down or evacuate during the Israeli ground invasion”…the article could have been more specific: at this point, only two overloaded medical facilities are still operating, out of the original 36. And one side effect of that deprivation of medical infrastructure is that there’s no longer any way to precisely count the civilian casualties. The rest of the article is basically speculation beyond the data, referring to a bunch of authoritative looking graphs that defy the ground-level reality of weeks of indiscriminate area bombing in Gaza City that was plainly intentional from the outset.

neither OCHA nor local and international NGOs are currently conducting real-time fatality verification in Gaza or attempting to distinguish between civilians and combatants. Moreover, only a third of Gaza’s hospitals are even partially functional, and many parts of the Strip have serious access problems, curtailing the use of this methodology to count deaths outside of Rafah and Khan Yunis governorates.

I find it disingenuous for the IDF to destroy nearly every medical facility in Gaza and then exploit the situation further by complaining about the resulting unreliability of the casualty count, and the ratio of civilians to combatants.

The methodology used in the first weeks of the war to tabulate casualties at the time when the medical faculties were still mostly functional can be found in this November 17 2023 article in the BBC.

More recently, this March 15, 2024 article in Time magazine provides an overview of the updated methodology for casualty tolls. It was written by “Les Roberts…an Epidemiologist and Professor Emeritus at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. He has taken part in the field measurement of mortality in crises including: Rwanda 1994, more than 30 health Zones in the Democratic Repoublic of Congo 1999-2002, Iraq 2004, Zimbabwe 2007, the Central African Repbulic 2009, 2018, and 2022, and Sierra Leone 2000 and 2014.”

According to Roberts, “there may have never been a major conflict where real-time surveillance data about deaths was more complete than is unfolding in Gaza today.”

Roberts concludes his article by pointedly noting that

“There are certain building blocks of society that require agreement for us to work well collectively. Society is weaker and discourse less productive if we cannot agree on at least a few basic things. In the case of Gaza, acknowledging that there was an appalling and extremely deadly attack on October 7^th, and that over 30,000 Gazans have died since, mostly women and children, seems like the most basic of cornerstones of reality on which to move toward constructive discussion and eventual resolution.”

In other words: don’t lie about shit, Israeli propagandists. It’s a bad look. You can’t fool all the people all the time. Credibility gets squandered very quickly under those circumstances.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Rafah are malnourished and on the brink of starvation. A mass population starvation resulting from a military blockade by a wealthy developed nation is unprecedented in my lifetime. Famine is one of those slow-rolling disasters that builds on delay and then accelerates; given how long the problem has been building, and the logistical reality that a food and medical supplies relief program at scale will require at least another three weeks in order to sustain a population of 1.2 million residents and refugees in Rafah, we are liable to witness a uniquely ghastly catastrophe unfolding within the next month, from the detached Olympian vantage point of our TVs and other media devices. It will look like a plague. If that happens, readers should remember that it was preventable. It was generated by human decisions, not the divine will of Almighty God.