Israel/Palestine update: November 26
The destruction of Gaza's health system; UN reps talk of "unprecedented carnage" and "genocide"; Israeli lies exposed; the flawed conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism; what happened on Oct 7?
Hi everyone. Welcome to my latest update on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Once again, it’s been more than a week since my last post (sorry, been real busy, plus my brother’s son came into the world!), which means there’s a lot to talk about. The topics that I cover include: children and women casualties in Gaza off the scale compared to any other modern conflict; the deliberate destruction of the Strip’s health system; UN representatives talk of “unprecedented carnage” and “genocide”; Israeli lies about al-Shifa exposed; the flawed conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism; new revelations about October 7, and much more.
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Now let’s get started. The big news is, of course, the 4-day ceasefire negotiated between Israel and Hamas, which came into effect yesterday. Under the deal, Hamas is to release at least 50 hostages, over the four days, in exchange for 150 Palestinian prisoners (several have already been released from both sides). While this is obviously a good news for the hostages/prisoners and their families, and even if the Israel-Hamas truce will provide some temporary relief to war-torn Gazans, there is little to celebrate. As The Economist writes:
For the 2.2m Palestinians trapped in Gaza… a few days of calm, and a promised influx of humanitarian aid, will [provide] a small respite. But few will be able to savour it, crammed as they are into dirty, overcrowded shelters — and fearing that, when the truce ends, another round of fighting is likely to follow.
An estimated 1.7m Gazans, 77% of the population, have been displaced. More than half are crammed into teeming shelters run by the un, where 160 people share each toilet and 700 people must use each shower. Skin diseases and diarrhoea are rife. A brief pause in the fighting will not offer Gazans much respite from this miserable existence. “The truce is empty talk”, says Alaa Labad, who was displaced from northern Gaza to a UN school in Khan Younis in the centre. “Israel will not allow us to return to our homes during it”.
Indeed, the BBC reported that Israeli soldiers fired on Palestinians trying to return to their homes in the north of the Gaza Strip.
But even more worrying is the fact that Netanyahu has made clear that the war will continue — and potentially even escalate — until Israel achieves “absolute victory”. Meaning that, once the truce is over, violence and destruction will once again start raining down on defenceless Gazans.
Mounting, colossal death toll — especially among children and women
It’s a terrifying prospect in light of the already astonishingly high death toll — so high that the Gaza Health Ministry, which had been carefully tracking casualties since the start of the war, on October 10 announced that it had lost the ability to count the dead because of the collapse of Gaza’s health system and the difficulty of retrieving bodies from areas overrun by Israeli tanks and troops. Even the Palestinian human rights organisation Al Haq, founded in 1979, said that this is the first time in its history that it is unable to document atrocities on the ground due to the intense and relentless nature of the hostilities.
For ten days, the official death stood at 11,078. Then, on November 21, the Gaza Media Office rather than the health ministry reported new numbers. According to them, the latest death toll is now 14,532.
However, considering that about 7,000 people are missing — almost certainly buried under the rubble — the true death toll is likely much “higher than is being cited”, as even Barbara Leaf, the US Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, recently admitted. According to The Economist, the number of deaths is probably higher than 20,000.
Even more shockingly, more than 70% of the casualties are women and children. In their latest update from a few days ago (the numbers are likely higher by now), Gazan authorities said 5,840 children had been killed, roughly 40% of the total. If the same share of the 7,000 missing are children and have indeed perished, that would bring the total number of children killed to more than 8,000.
It cannot be stressed enough just how off the scale these numbers are compared to any other conflict in modern times — not just relative to overall casualties, but in absolute terms as well, relative to the timescale. As the following graph from Al Jazeera makes clear, the number of children killed in Gaza every day exceeds every other recent conflict by a huge margin.
Even more tragically, according to an investigation by a Norwegian newspaper, the most common age of those killed in Gaza is 5; the second most common age is 3.
No wonder Pope Francis felt compelled to say: “This is not war, it is terrorism”. As a side note, my post about the Pope’s statement has raked up 20 million views on X; could Francis be on to something?
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