What Happened in Gaza Might Be Even Worse Than We Think : Shared by Tom McDermott

While I agreed with Lydia Polgreen’s conclusions, I was surprised that she felt obliged to spend so much time refuting the worn-out claim that Gaza’s death toll was inflated by a “Hamas-controlled” Ministry of Health — a label no one would dream of applying to a “Likud-controlled” MOH in Israel or a “GOP-controlled” health system in the United States. The charge always carried more propaganda value than substance.

The idea that Hamas fighters would sit down with medical statisticians to fabricate casualty lists was never credible, yet it served for months as a convenient way to dismiss Gaza’s suffering. Thankfully, that fiction finally collapsed some months ago. Even media outlets generally sympathetic to Israel now concede that Gaza’s Ministry of Health operates a disciplined, transparent process for recording deaths under impossible conditions — a process repeatedly confirmed by WHO and UNICEF observers on the ground.

Moreover, a peer-reviewed study published in The Lancet by researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Yale University, and other institutions concluded that Gaza’s official figures likely understate the death toll by at least 40 percent — and that 59 percent of those killed were women, children, or adults over 65. This would bring the real number of dead close to 99,000 as of early October, not counting the tens of thousands maimed or permanently disabled. As Polgreen notes, many thousands more have died from the indirect consequences of the war — famine, disease, and the collapse of Gaza’s health system — with the vast majority again being women, children, and the elderly.

Tom

What Happened in Gaza Might Be Even Worse Than We Think
Lydia Polgreen
The New York Times
Click here for the article

Summary
Lydia Polgreen examines the staggering human toll of Israel’s two-year war on Gaza and challenges efforts to minimize or dismiss the scale of death and suffering. She cites new evidence suggesting that Gaza’s Health Ministry’s figure of 68,229 dead — already shocking — may undercount fatalities by nearly 40 percent. Expert surveys confirm that most of the victims were women, children, and the elderly, contradicting Israeli claims that the majority were fighters. Polgreen also warns that indirect deaths from famine and disease could add tens of thousands more, as Israel’s blockade and the collapse of Gaza’s health system leave millions in desperate conditions. She concludes that, proportionally, the Gaza war may be deadlier than those in Yemen, Syria, Sudan, or Ukraine, and that attempts to deny or downplay this reality are both morally and factually untenable.

Quotes

• “The Ministry of Health… is really conservative actually in putting people on the list. The information is incomparably better than what we know about recent conflicts in Tigray, Sudan, South Sudan.”

• “The majority of those killed — some 56 percent — were women, children and the elderly.”

• “I’d be very surprised if there’s anything less than 50,000 nontrauma deaths.”

• “If de Waal is anywhere close to right, this conflict will have killed 7.5 percent of the prewar population of Gaza in just two years.”

• “The rubble tells one story; the people who created it tell another. The reckoning will be in deciding which story we choose to believe.”