Why Claiming Gaza’ Death Toll Was In The Ten Thousands Mattered

The most recent work does estimate that the Palestinian health authority significantly under-reported traumatic-injury deaths up to the end of June 2024 (i.e., pretty much the same period as covered by the previous study): https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext.

In absolute terms, they estimated total traumatic (i.e., direct) deaths at that point as 64,260. An equivalent undercount of the currently reported health authority total would put the current number of traumatic deaths at 81,000.

The challenge I’m having is that the gap between that and four or five hundred thousand presumes that a bunch of people, many of whom are reasonably smart and motivated to report higher rather than lower casualty figures all decided to lowball total mortality by a factor of about four.

Bottom line, I don’t understand that would happen. I can absolutely see some sort of significant undercount (not least, there’s got to be significant indirect mortality which these figures don’t touch on at all) but a 4X multiplier without the people on the ground apparently saying anything is challenging. This isn’t the dark side of the moon – they are actually working on understanding how many people are getting killed, they aren’t unsophisticated in their approaches and – perhaps most importantly – they are incentivized to report deaths.

Balanced against that, I have to accept that Donald J. Trump knows how many people are currently in Gaza *and* accurately sporked out that information in a presser. Given the man’s statistical acumen, that’s a stretch. At the end of the day, I don’t think it matters one iota – we long since got to the pattern of behaviour and number of significant digits required for an airtight assertion of war crimes. Another 10, 100 or 1000X multiplier wouldn’t make any material difference.

Everything is aligning with my outlook.

Either the Gaza population overthrow Hamas, demand the end of “resistance” and reconcile themselves to a two-state solution brokered by the Gulf states – after which Gaza will be rebuilt.

Or, they will be moved to somewhere in Africa, brokered by the US and Israel (Somaliland and Greater Rwanda are the likely destinations).

Secretly, everyone will be happier by that outcome, the Palestinian issue will be resolved, the Gulf states can do business openly with Israel and of course all Arab regimes despise the Palestinian people (even those who in the axis of resistance like Assads Syria).

The great dirty secret of the Arab world is the private hostility towards Palestinians from all types of Arab elites.

Ralph Nader was saying “put another zero” after the official toll early on and I’m inclined to believe him. Some commentators have estimated the death toll as high as 600,000 to 800,000, based pn the numbers Trump was using im reference to those Gazans left to ethmically cleanse. I haven’t heard any estimates for how many from the West Bank and Lebanon and Syria were killed but hey, just more “untermenchen”, right?

All clear & correct, Ian, Ralph Nader was someone who indicated maybe 6 months into the war that the death toll was at least 200,000, so respect to him as well. A great point from your previous post deserves repeating: This plan is very obviously ethnic cleansing, which is evil. It is, however, the lesser evil compared to Biden’s “keep them locked up and bomb and starve them all to death”, which would have presumably continued if Harris had one. (One term, I presume?)

This calls for an on-topic digression viz Harris’s clear inability to gain electoral support as an utterly inane and dislikable political entity, on a par with her fellow war criminal, HRC in 2016. . . .Let’s not forget that when running in 2016, she was memorably called-out for her horrid career in California politics, and had no meaningful defense. As someone who lived in California from 1989–2021 I can share that she was broadly despised for her open corruption and racist acts while in office. (These have been discussed ad nauseum in previous posts by me & others.) While campaigning in 2020, there was only one place where she was widely supported and funded– the very wealthy Hamptons, on the East Coast. She had to drop out of California even before Obama’s Night of the Long Knives because polling showed she would run 4th or 5th in her “home state.” During the election this time, she only did massively well in D.C., the District of Columbia, over 70% from what I saw. Now this vote is indicative that only the professional political class had ANY enthusiasm for her (the MSM was paid to fluff her, as well, but it’s hard to say what percentage of them had any actual enthusiasm.) One could compare her projected results to George McGovern in 1972, though of course running against someone as unpleasant as Donald, & with the big Media in her corner, she did a bit better. McG only won Massachusetts and D.C.!! Nothing more. D.C. insiders invariably support Dem “liberals” (which Kamala was not actually) clearly for economic reasons & to stay on the gravy train, as do the Hamptons crowd. See the Upton Sinclair comment about men on the payroll being unable to believe something contrary to their paycheck. Also, Biden being as big a sore loser as Trump was in 2020, it’s clear that he endorsed Harris the day after Obama, Clooney, Pelosi et al kicked the old man to the curb to deliberately punish the Dem subordinates. (And he shares Trump’s segregationist tendencies & ideology, as well.) Obama’s dream of running the bland, bald Astronaut Mark Kelly for the complacent dumb Libs was strangled in vitro.

Now, as to whether Trump will be the “Lesser Evil” or not, to Genocide Joe: Bibi’s recent visit to D.C. split 2 of the smartest commenters I know of, Max Blumenthal and Pepe Escobar. Now I regard Max as among the wisest regarding West Asia, Israel, and “the region” having spent years reporting from there, evidently fairly conversant in Hebrew, etc. Pepe’s beat is wider, the entire world, but esp. Asia, the “Global South” and the new BRICS project. He also knows a lot about American culture which he uses in his coverage (movie analogies, etc.)

When Trump “explained” the Plan both with Bibi in the Green Room, then with him at podiums for the press, many were bewildered by his Real Estate (comparing Gaza to the Riviera) take and claim the U.S. would be the sovereign party to “redevelop” Gaza when all the locals were shipped out to Jordan and Egypt (a complete non-starter, as neither Sisi nor the Anglo-Jordanian King want to be couped or killed.)

Especially when Trump free-styled to the press, many noted Bibi’s grimacing body language and assumed Trump, not being the type to “share” glory or spoils with Lessers, was planning a hostile takeover from his funder, Israel, a military pipsqueak when not armed unconditionally by US . . . He ran plenty of Self-Dealing opportunities as President last time, e.g. having foreign dignitaries be hosted at Trump properties (which they paid for), putting his golf trips on the gov’t. tab, etc. So since Jared came up with the “Expel or kill all the Darkies, and develop the Land” during Trump’s first term, it seemed to some that this was Trump’s openly announced plan.

This is where disagreement started– Blumenthal refused to buy this, thinks his strings are still being pulled by Miriam Adelson and this was just ego-fueled posturing. On the other hand, Escobar (& additionally Scott Ritter) thought that Trump was doing a money-&-land grab against our Zionist flunky . . .

I’m unclear at the moment on which is more credible. One thing Max more recently cited to support his take is that no less than Mega-Chickenhawk LIndsey Graham vetoed sending US troops into Gaza as the al-Qassam brigades have proven quite adept at popping out of tunnels among the rubble and offing large #s of invaders. Since S. Carolina has a very large # of military staff, Ms. Lindsey evidently decided this would be a block to continued re-election.

Another thing that (to me) makes the US elbowing the Zionist faux-locals from Ukraine, etc. out of that “beautiful beachfront” land is that DJT made exactly the same fantasy claims that “the big, beautiful Wall” would be “paid for by Mexico” never materialized. Trump promised at the Presser that “neighbors” (the Saudis, I’d guessed, UAE and other Gulf tyrannies) would pay for the redevelopment, that Jared would then own on the US’s behalf as a member of our Royal Family. Now the US could pay for the “demolition, removal of bombs”, transfer, etc., but it’s hard to see how, even in the deeply corrupt DC, this then could be handed over to the Chief Exec & Co.

Don’t get me wrong, the corruption under Biden was epic. No less than (Dem-supporting) Politico admitted that Biden family members had collected up to $17 million in graft and payoffs from various sources: his brother, children, grandchildren, in-laws, etc. And they arbitrarily omitted Hunter’s $50,000 monthly payments as an “energy expert” in Ukraine, as well. And the mass pardons Biden did on the way out speak for themselves as to how overt the criminality was.

Pepe’s theory will only work out IF (a giant if) Trump has a tighter staff more capable of actual revolutionary change and discriminate (v. indiscriminate, term 45) destruction of enemies, roadblocks, etc., which seems not impossible but very unlikely to me. Pepe threw out a really weird claim (speaking to Nima of Neutrality Studies) that Ukraine had offered to take the Palestinians in IF more weapons were given to them at the same time. Zelensky is on the edge of the Abyss, no doubt, but this seems totally unworkable. The Ultra-Nationalist, Banderist regime of Zelensky is extremely racist toward non-whites as well as toward Russia. I’d bet if Palestinians were parked there for long they’d be slaves or unpaid servants, but again, the whole thing seems unworkable.

So maybe Blumenthal is right, D.C. never changes (he grew up & still lives there, dad was Clinton’s lawyer), the Deep State always steers in the same direction toward imperial overreach, new wars and regime changes, burning down every “enemy” state that could emerge sovereign and independent.

In any case, the nearly 1 million Gazans marching back to their demolished homes (while in the meantime, killing by the Izzys has shifted to Settler-IDF murders and house demolitions in the West Bank (all watched on and supported by Abbas’ Palestinian “Authority”) means a wider effort at full extermination of the Natives (the actual descendants of the actual Jews of antiquity).

I want to end on a note of hope– It was reported (& I confirmed it online) that the Belgian Parliament in Brussels has begun the process of officially designating that Israel is perpetrating a Genocide in Gaza. So cracks are beginning to emerge in the West’s immovable support for the Zionist project. Again, as I’ve said before, Trump says the quiet part out loud and puts an Uglier face on the Project. (Which is obviously a good thing.) Oh, and for a “Profile in Hypocrisy” Rep. Al Green (D.) is calling for Trump to be impeached for “ethnic cleansing” as stated at the WH meeting with Bibi. (It was fine when Biden did it, but not the Orange Man. To be fair, Blumenthal acknowledged that Green voted against the big Genocide package to Israel under Blinken et al.)

It’s an ugly spectacle. Hard to see how it will get any calmer, and the attempts to normalize it seem to be sputtering.

We don’t know the death toll. The number of violent deaths is at least 60,000– I read that the ones missing under rubble are now presumed dead. The nonviolent deaths— I read somewhere months ago ( so I don’t know where to look) that they were not including the deaths from disease and lack of treatment deliberately. I am guessing those start out as a small fraction of the total and then pass the violent toll if food and medical supplies are kept out but have no idea when the number of these deaths would pass the ones killed by violence.

We don’t need to argue that it needs to be in the hundreds of thousands to be a genocide. It is fairly obvious that the bulk of the dead are civilians. The 972 magazine keeps putting out pieces about how the Israelis were willing to kill hundreds of civilians to get one high ranking target and a 20 to 1 ratio for the foot soldiers, but you know darn well that the ones pushing for these ratios saw the civilians as less than human and deserving of their fate.

Meanwhile, the hasbara crowd keeps saying that the civilian to terrorist ratio is 1 to 1 but that is based on Israeli claims and we know they counted any male civilian they killed as Hamas. Similar to the US in Vietnam.

This ties into something I’d noticed from the start. For the entire thing the media was habitually reporting on how the medical system in Gaza was ‘nearing collapse’, ‘on the verge of collapse’, ‘in danger of collapse’, ‘collapse imminent’, and so on.

I think the reality is that the medical system collapsed in any sense of being able to fully function and coordinate within at most the first couple months. After that it was just a series of isolated clinics and hospitals, always critically low of everything, and seldom able to even get ambulances from one location to another to redirect patients.

The official death numbers have to be considered in that context. They were always the absolute minimum, the number that could be carefully verified in a medical system that had collapsed into a series of islands and was unable to coordinate. The listed dead were those that could be satisfactorily identified. At one point Biden, the piece of shit, parroted an Israeli talking point that the death numbers were fake Hamas propaganda. In response the Gazan government published a detailed list of the dead up to that point, complete with their citizen ID numbers. I believe an Iranian magazine turned this list into a cover for an issue. If that was fake, it was one hell of a forgery (it wasn’t fake, obviously). But at that point the list was ‘still only’ around 20,000 dead.

The low numbers (and they always had at least the proviso that at any given time at least 10,000 were missing, probably dead under rubble, so add them to the total) were always what they could prove to some meaningful extent. Because if they were claiming hundreds of thousands of dead, without firm evidence, which given the context they understandably couldn’t provide, the numbers would seem too fantastical to be creditable. It would be jumped on as obviously fake propaganda, and would discredit further anything they might say in the future. But those seemingly fantastical types of numbers were likely real.

Just to put 400,000 into some perspective, the Armenian genocide, which basically everyone who isn’t a Turk or an Israeli acknowledges, was between 600,000 and 1.5 million victims. The killings in Bosnia (which did happen, and were genocide, and I’m not going to engage in debate on this) were between 8,000 and 30,000, depending on who gets counted.

Events in Yugoslavia were subjected to decades of endless coverage, court trials, and minute searching for evidence in the field. For far fewer victims. I won’t hold my breath that Israel ever gets subjected to even a fraction of any of that, much less 10+ times for its 10+ times number of victims. But we should never let what these fucking bastards have done be forgotten. It is staggering. And if the full scale ethnic cleansing forced relocation happens there will doubtless be even more deaths. It’s already a meaningful percentage of the Holocaust, the supposedly ultimate, most unique and sacred genocide ever.

Can’t wait for the pomp and circumstance when Bibi’s Butler appoints Miriam Adelson as acting Governor of Gaza. It’s going to be quite a chparade …

Z