Israel/Palestine update: December 4

Killing in Gaza “unparalleled and unprecedented”; deliberate targeting of civilians; Israel knew about Hamas’s attack plan more than a year ago; massive short-selling of Israeli shares before Oct 7.

Hi everyone. Welcome to my latest update on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In today’s post, I cover: more and more international organisations denounce the “unparalleled and unprecedented” nature of the killing in Gaza; evidence that Israel is deliberately targeting civilians, and even using an AI system to facilitate a “mass assassination factory”; Israel knew about Hamas’s attack plan more than a year ago; massive short-selling of Israeli shares in the days before October 7, and much more.

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An “unparalleled and unprecedented” rate of killing

Let’s starts, as always, with the death toll. As we had anticipated, the respite provided by the ceasefire was short-lived: as soon as the ceasefire ended, on Friday morning, Israel immediately restarted its mass bombardment campaign — possibly on an even bigger scale than what we had seen in the previous weeks.

And what’s worse, most of the strikes have been concentrated in southern Gaza, in and around the cities of Khan Younis and Rafah, near the Egyptian border — which Israel had previously designated as “safe zones”, telling the inhabitants of northern Gaza to seek refuge there.

According to Gazan authorities, almost 1,000 people have been killed since the end of the ceasefire, further driving up the already shockingly high civilian death toll. Over 15,000 Gazans — including 6,600 children — are now estimated to have been killed by Israeli forces since the start of the assault on the Strip. These numbers do not deviate from Israeli estimates, though the actual death toll is likely to be significantly higher, considering that thousands more bodies are still buried under the rubble caused by the bombings.

We also know from Israeli sources that the overwhelming majority of people killed are civilians, since the Israeli military itself estimates that it has killed only between 1,000 and 2,000 Hamas fighters.

As I noted in my previous post, this rate and percentage of civilian (especially children) casualties is totally off the scale compared to any conflict in modern times.

Even the UN Secretary-General António Guterres stated that the killing in Gaza, especially among children, is “unparalleled and unprecedented in any conflict since I am Secretary-General”:

As you know, we report every year on children killed in armed conflicts by different actors. I have already presented seven reports, and in these reports the highest number of children killed in one year by one actor was the Taliban in 2017-8. The second by the Syrian government and its allies, before 2020, and it was around 700. We’ve had Russia last year: 350. We had Saudi Arabia, if you remember the uproar in relation to Yemen. In one year, the maximum was 300. Now, without entering into discussion about the accuracy of the numbers that were published by the authorities in Gaza, what is clear is that we’ve had in a few weeks thousands of children killed. So this is what matters.

As the UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell said following the resumption of the Israeli attacks, “the Gaza Strip is once again the most dangerous place in the world to be a child”.

Even the notoriously pro-Israeli New York Times has been forced to admit that the pace of deaths in Gaza, especially among children and women, is beyond anything ever seen in modern times. Here are some excerpts from the article:

Experts say that even a conservative reading of the casualty figures reported from Gaza show that the pace of death during Israel’s campaign has few precedents in this century.

Researchers say the pace of deaths reported in Gaza during the Israeli bombardment has been exceptionally high.

People are being killed in Gaza more quickly, they say, than in even the deadliest moments of US-led attacks in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, which were themselves widely criticized by human rights groups.

Precise comparisons of war dead are impossible, but conflict-casualty experts have been taken aback at just how many people have been reported killed in Gaza — most of them women and children — and how rapidly.

More children have been killed in Gaza since the Israeli assault began than in the world’s major conflict zones combined — across two dozen countries — during all of last year, even with the war in Ukraine, according to UN tallies of verified child deaths in armed conflict.

More than twice as many women and children have already been reported killed in Gaza than in Ukraine after almost two years of Russian attacks, according to United Nations estimates.

More women and children have been killed in Gaza in less than two months than the roughly 7,700 civilians documented as killed by US forces and their international allies in the entire first year of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, according to estimates from Iraq Body Count, an independent British research group.

And the number of women and children reported killed in Gaza since the Israeli campaign began last month has already started to approach the roughly 12,400 civilians documented to have been killed by the United States and its allies in Afghanistan during nearly 20 years of war, according to Neta C. Crawford, co-director of Brown University’s Costs of War Project.

Women and children account for nearly 70 percent of all deaths reported in Gaza even though most combatants are men — an “extraordinary statistic”, Rick Brennan, the regional emergency director for the World Health Organization’s Eastern Mediterranean office, said at an event this month.

While the overall death tolls in those wars were larger, the number of people killed in Gaza “in a very short period of time is higher than in other conflicts”, said Professor Crawford, who has extensively researched modern wars.

After initially questioning the death toll in Gaza, the Biden administration now concedes that the true figures for civilian casualties may be even worse.

Barbara Leaf, the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, told a House committee this month that American officials thought the civilian casualties were “very high, frankly, and it could be that they’re even higher than are being cited”.

It is not just the unrelenting scale of the strikes, which Israel put at more than 15,000 before reaching a brief ceasefire in recent days. It is also the nature of the weaponry itself.

Israel’s liberal use of very large weapons in dense urban areas, including US-made 2,000-pound bombs that can flatten an apartment tower, is surprising, some experts say.

“It’s beyond anything that I’ve seen in my career”, said Marc Garlasco, a military adviser for the Dutch organization PAX and a former senior intelligence analyst at the Pentagon.

There are countless videos out there that offer an almost unbearably graphic description of the relentless mass killing of children in Gaza — on average, more than 100 children are killed every day in Gaza, most of which are aged five or younger.

I’m not a fan of war porn, because I believe that as people who have the blessing of being mere spectators of the unfolding tragedy in Gaza we have an obligation to try to remain cool-headed and not let our darkest emotions get the best of us, because only by remaining lucid can we hope, somehow, to bring the massacre to an end.

But I came across a video the other day that I want to share with you, because it shows more than just desperation — it shows the triumph of the human spirit even in the face of inconceivable (for the most of us) suffering.

“A mass assassination factory”

But there’s an even more sinister and gruesome aspect to all this, and that is the growing evidence that Israel isn’t just treating the mass murder of civilians as “collateral damage” in its war on Hamas, which would be bad enough, but that it is in fact deliberately targeting civilians — that it is, in other words, waging war on Gazans themselves.

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