The Gaza Death Toll Undercount
Chris Hedges | The Gaza Health Ministry has so far recorded some 38,000 deaths and 85,000 injuries. This is a vast undercount. The Health Ministry only counts the names of deceased recorded by hospitals and morgues. | Given that Israel has bombed most hospitals, clinics and morgues into disuse and blocked medical supplies and fuel, given that there are tens of thousands of missing, most likely buried under the rubble, it is certain that the number of dead is in the tens of thousands, perhaps as high as 200,000. ■ The Chair of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh, Devi Sridhar, estimates half a million Palestinians in Gaza will die in 2024. (It’s not just bullets and bombs. I have never seen health organisations as worried as they are about disease in Gaza | Devi Sridhar). This is a far more realistic body count. As Israel continues its saturation bombing and shelling of Gaza, as Palestinians continue to succumb to the Israeli orchestrated famine as well as the spread of infectious diseases caused by a lack of clean water, food, sanitation and health facilities, the numbers of dead will skyrocket. ■ Hamas fighters, able to take refuge in the vast tunnel system in Gaza, have little interest in publicizing the huge numbers of civilians left above ground to die. The Israeli government is not anxious to make public the actual scale of the killing. But even the official undercount is too onerous for the mandarins in the two ruling parties, as the House recently passed a an amendment to the Department of State appropriations bill that “prohibits funds appropriated by this act to be made available for the State Department to cite statistics obtained from the Gaza Health Ministry.” ■ And so we blot out all numbers, as if the most heinous genocide in modern history, one that by the time it is over will take hundreds of thousands of lives, is not happening.
■ Day 239: Over 70 Bodies Found, including 20 Children, After Israeli Military Withdraws from Jabalia Camp (06/01/24)