Informed Comment (Ann Arbor) – Nir Hasson at Haaretz reported Thursday that the Israeli military has admitted that it now accepts the death toll of some 71,000 for victims it killed in Gaza, a toll estimated by the Gaza Ministry of Health.
Hasson is a careful journalist and certainly was reporting what officers told him, but an army spokesman. But on Friday a military spokesman came out and denied it all, saying, “The (Israeli military) clarifies that the details published do not reflect official … data.” I suspect Hasson’s story will prove accurate.
He added, “U.K.-based nonprofit organisation Action on Armed Violence published a contradictory study this week, according to which for every combatant killed by Israeli fire, five civilians were killed – meaning 83 percent of all casualties were civilians.” Israeli Prime Minister and American observers like political scientist Michael Walzer attempted to claim that the ratio of combatants to noncombatants killed by the Israeli military in Gaza was par for the course. Having 83% of the people you kill be innocent civilians, however, is not normal and compares very poorly to the Russian campaign in Ukraine or even the American war on Iraq.
All through Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza, which has tapered off but not ended, the Israeli military routinely cast doubt on the Ministry of Health figures, issuing its own only to retract them constantly, while issuing other phony numbers. Israeli officials deprecated the Ministry of Health as “Hamas-run” even though it was staffed by bureaucrats and professionals who were not political and carried no arms.
The Israelis and their pushy lobbies in Western capitals even made all the American newspapers and television shows include the mantra of “Hamas-run” whenever they mentioned the Ministry of Health or its statistics, helping undermine the credibility of the numbers.
Why do the Israelis issue these denials and try to muddy the waters in this way? It is to manipulate the Western print and television news media. If an anchor can go on TV and just say, the Israelis have so far killed X thousands of Palestinians, that makes an impression. But if the anchor has to say, according to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health the number killed is X, though that number is contested by the Israeli government, then the message can’t get through to the audience. These are terrorist numbers (“Hamas-run”) and so unreliable in their foundation. And they can’t be true since our white Alamo in the Middle East disputes them.
Plus these smokescreens gave ammunition to pro-Israeli editors and media poobahs who wanted to curtail what news professionals could say on air.
Instead of experiencing the full horror face-on, Western audiences have the information fractured and and made doubtful. It is a way of hiding a genocide in plain sight.
And frustrated news people often seem to have just wanted to avoid bringing up Gaza at all, so it got almost no airtime on legacy stations. It was over at TikTok, which is why Larry Ellison had to be allowed to buy and censor it.
Imagine, the Israelis murdered 19,000 children. I say murdered because children are not combatants and they weren’t in firefights with Israeli soldiers. Killing so many children was part of the genocidal plan, since their deaths reduce fertility rates. And remember that half of these children were little girls. Girls like six-year-old Hind Rajab.
But no one could go on American television and say, the Israeli army has murdered 9,500 little girls, wearing pink frills and clutching teddy bears. They had to dance around with weasel words like “Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health,” implying that these deaths were made up or were part of terrorist propaganda.
The horrid Bill Maher and his guest Van Jones even guffawed about dead Gaza babies. They implied that there weren’t really any dead babies in Gaza, that it was all a hoax. And these are Democrats, who have surrendered to creeping Trumpian fascism. Because as Ta-Nehisi Coates rightly said, “I would submit to you that if you can’t draw the line at genocide, you probably can’t draw the line at democracy.”
Then President Joe Biden, whose otherwise distinguished career will forever be besmirched by his complicity in the Gaza genocide, openly denied that Israel was killing large numbers of civilians in Gaza, saying he had “no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed.” He let the Israelis drop one-ton bombs on civilian apartment buildings with no military purpose, turning entire extended families into red mist, for more than two years.
The US State Department, back before Trump and Elon Musk gutted it, used routinely to depend on Gaza ministry of health figures, which were known in the international community to be broadly reliable. Even Israeli authorities used MoH figures.
Hasson points out that the Gaza Ministry of Health gathered death data from the hospitals and morgues in the Strip, and were careful to list names and i.d. numbers and other identifiers. Questioning its numbers would mean charging it with making up those names and i.d. numbers, but no one has ever made such an accusation, and the family members of the deceased can attest that they really aren’t around any more. I mean, imagine for a moment that Palestinians are real people like you and me. Wouldn’t we notice if our uncle on our mother’s side couldn’t be found any more?
Image of Gaza by hosny salah from Pixabay
But powerful pro-Israel propaganda outfits like the Washington Institute for Near East Policy tried to pretend that the Gaza Ministry of Health fatality reports were riddled with inaccuracies and were unreliable, in a March 26, 2024 poorly reasoned screed. The Washington a.k.a. Tel Aviv Institute is extremely influential and actually has American government officials, both civilian and military, detailed to it to be propagandized into a knee-jerk pro-Israel position.
Inside the US government, as well, Erin Banco, Jonathan Landay and Humeyra Pamuk at Reuters revealed that the U.S. ambassador to Israel Jack Lew quashed USAID reports about how bad the situation was in Gaza, refusing to let them circulate or go up to the White House. USAID characterized the situation as an “apocalyptic wasteland,” which of course it is.
I have no idea why the Israeli military is now accepting the MoH numbers, if it is. But after all, the big campaign is winding down, so they don’t have to manipulate the news anchors any more. But worse, the full death toll will now gradually come out, which will be much bigger than 71,000, based not just on hospital and morgue reporting but on public health projections about all the dead that never got to a hospital. The Israeli military may prefer to be able to cite a lower number provided by the hospitals.
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