Israel's "striking" silence and the world's appalling absence

Yesterday, first online report, identified as coming in 19 hours ago, "32 Palestinians killed trying to reach food distribution hubs" (NPR); then 3 hours ago, "Israeli forces kill 67 Palestinians seeking aid" (BBC); again 3 hours ago, "At least 73 people seeking aid killed by Israeli gunfire" (CNN); then 2 minutes ago, "Israel kills 92 aid seekers in Gaza."

By this morning, the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces since yesterday's dawn was up to "at least 104," as told by local medicos and reported by Al Jazeera.

On Saturday, the Palestinian health ministry warned that "extreme hunger was increasing in Gaza and growing numbers of people were arriving at its facilities in a state of extreme exhaustion and fatigue."

On Sunday, the Israel Defense Forces said it "fired warning shots to remove an immediate threat." [Italics mine.]

Some of the threatening Palestinians were captured on film by Agence-France Presse.

Israel's armed forces have killed 59,220 Palestinians, 80% of them civilians, reports the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

In a "detailed analysis" of the six months leading up to April 2024, the U.N. Human Rights Office found that nearly 70% of "those killed in Gaza by strikes, shelling and other conduct of hostilities... [were] children and women" — extrapolating, more than 41,000 by today.

Late last month, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Hamas' Health Ministry had just "published an updated list of those killed in the war." Itemized in "a 1,227-page chart" were the names of the dead, "arranged from youngest to oldest"; the fathers and grandfathers' names; dates of birth; and ID numbers.

The names of the children under the age of 18 cover 381 pages and amount to 17,121 children..., 9,126 were women.

Israeli spokespersons, journalists and influencers reject with knee-jerk disgust the data of the Palestinian Health Ministry, claiming that it's inflated and exaggerated. But more and more international experts are stating that not only is this list, with all the horror it embodies, reliable – but that it may even be very conservative in relation to reality.

One is the University of London's Michael Spagat, "a world-class expert on mortality in violent conflicts." He and his research team published a study of Palestinian deaths in the same week that Haaretz's article and Hamas' list appeared.

Prof. Spagat concluded that, "as of January 2025, some 75,200 people died a violent death in Gaza during the war, the vast majority caused by Israeli munitions," wrote Haaretz. But Hamas "placed the number of those killed since the war's start at 45,660. In other words, the Health Ministry's data undercounted the true total by about 40 percent." 

Spagat explained the discrepancy. Many Palestinians "died from the indirect effects of war: hunger, cold, diseases that could not be treated because of the destruction of the health system." Other equiprobable reasons for names' non-appearance on the Health Ministry's list:

Thousands of people are still buried under the rubble of tens of thousands of buildings in the Strip ... [and] some people were close to the epicenter of explosions and nothing remains of them. Another explanation suggested by Spagat is that families who lost loved ones simply buried them without bringing the bodies to the hospitals and without reporting the deaths to the Health Ministry.

A doctoral student at the London School of Economics who concurrently published a paper on the Gaza dead asserted that "Some families just don't want to report or are unable to report." Or, "Maybe the parents die, and the children, and an 8-year-old remains," said Matthew Cockerill. "How is the 8-year-old going to report this?"

Hareetz related that Spagat's "results are very similar to those of a study conducted by completely different methods and published last January by researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. That group also estimated the disparity between the Health Ministry data and the true figures to be about 40 percent."  

One year ago I wrote that it was months ago when

I calculated that the then-rate of Palestinian deaths in Gaza would, if the slaughter continued in the absence of international intervention, ultimately total about 100,000.... My calculation was an unserious one, for I simply could not accept that the world community would permit the virtual genocide of the Palestinian people. And yet ... my unserious calculation is halfway to the 100,000 dead marker. And I'm no longer unserious about the genocidal potential of Benjamin Netanyahu and his war cabinet. [Bold, original.]

Haaretz, in its late-June article:

Even without the anticipated future waves of excess mortality, the combination of casualties from violence and those who died from diseases and hunger led to the death of 83,740 people prior to January.... Since then, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, more than 10,000 people have been killed, and that doesn't include those in the category of excess mortality. The upshot is that even if the war hasn't yet crossed the line of 100,000 dead, it's very close. [Bold, mine.]

About the number killed and to be killed, unneeded here is any comment beyond what Haaretz called the "striking silence" of Israeli officials or my older observation about the appalling absence of the world community.

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