Even if the truce between Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and Hamas results in the promised four-day pause in hostilities – or longer – the horror enveloping Gaza in terms of lives lost is worse than many people think. Among those who oppose Israel’s onslaught, there are still those who do not truly grasp it. It’s understandable that Israeli authorities are seeking to sow doubt about the size of the death toll, because the numbers expose the gravity of the crimes being committed. But we should not be deceived.
Take the argument that the health ministry is Hamas-run and, therefore, its figures can never be trusted. It sounds like a reasonable enough claim on the surface, until you realise that in previous conflicts the death toll reported by the ministry was largely consistent with the UN’s and even Israel’s counts. Last month, after doubts were raised by President Biden, the ministry even released the names, ages and identification numbers of the victims.
Indeed, the health ministry’s official estimate – currently 13,300 dead after six weeks – could well be an underestimate, as a senior US official has conceded. The figures do not include the dead buried under rubble who have not been retrieved. According to the independent Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, which is chaired by US emeritus law professor and former UN special rapporteur on Palestine, Richard Falk, the civilian death toll as of 20 November is 16,413, with nearly 34,000 injured. This would mean one in every 142 Palestinian civilians killed in a month and a half.
Given that this slaughter may not end soon, the current health ministry tally of 13,300 dead, when placed in the context of Gaza’s population of 2.2 million, tells us something about the sheer scale of what has happened. Comparisons with other conflicts are truly eye-opening here. The Bosnian war loomed over my own childhood as a case study of an unspeakable atrocity. About 40,000 civilians died in those killing fields in the years between 1992 and 1995. That was over three years, not six weeks, and it was in a country whose prewar population was about twice that of Gaza.
But aren’t many of the deaths in Gaza not civilians, but Hamas militants, you might ask? The evidence suggests not. Research by the Iraq Body Count project, which diligently compiled violent civilian deaths after the 2003 invasion, concluded last month about Gaza that “few of the victims can have been combatants”. Analysing the ministry of health data, they found only a “modest excess of adult males killed”, which could be explained by their greater exposure to risk in, for instance, rescue efforts. With an estimated 70% of the dead being women and children – and many of the slain men unlikely to have been combatants – their conclusion is difficult to rebut.
We could also make a comparison with the war in Syria, rightly regarded as one of the great moral obscenities of our age. The UN estimates that nearly 307,000 civilians have met violent ends since 2011. Its prewar population was just over 10 times that of Gaza. This means that after just six weeks, the death rate of Palestinians is approaching half that of Syrians after a decade of war.
Another comparison is Yemen. This is a tragedy close to my heart: I’ve written multiple columns about the western-backed Saudi onslaught and visited a Yemeni refugee camp, where children drew pictures of dead relatives slain by bombs. An estimated 15,000 Yemeni civilians were killed by direct military action between 2015 and 2021, mostly by Saudi-led airstrikes. This is comparable to Gaza, except Yemen’s average population in these war years was 14 times greater than Gaza’s, and this death toll was amassed over six years, not six weeks.
It might be countered that Yemen’s death toll is actually closer to 377,000, because of deaths from indirect causes, such as a lack of access to food, water and healthcare. But, of course, the same will be true of Gaza under siege and that figure will only become clear after the current bloodshed is over.
A comparison of child deaths across conflicts, macabre as it is, underlines the unique nature of this conflict in Gaza. In the first two years of the Syrian war, children were estimated to represent roughly 10% of deaths, in Iraq since 2003, 8.6% and in Ukraine since the invasion, 6%. In Gaza, they represent an estimated 42% of deaths.
No comparison is perfect and every tragedy must be understood on its own terms. Yet these numbers give a sense of the unusually brutal scale of what is happening in Gaza. It is not as if the realities on the ground are hidden. Thanks to courageous journalists and media workers – dozens now killed – we have evidence of the civilian toll in the most graphic detail possible. So where is the urgency on behalf of western politicians and many media outlets to put a stop to this? Why doesn’t it rival their justified disgust at the horrors unleashed by Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine? Few cheerleaders of Israel’s invasion have been able to admit that Hamas’s obscene atrocities of 7 October do not justify civilian death on this scale.
This truce is welcome but the widespread destruction of infrastructure will mean people keep dying long after the bombs stop falling. And with Israel’s stated desire to occupy Gaza “for an indefinite period” , much violence is surely yet to come. We are left with a bleak conclusion. There isn’t even a pretence that Palestinian life matters. An Israeli civilian death toll of more than 1,000 was rightly understood to be intolerable, but there appears no limit to how many Gazans can meet violent ends. This brazen disregard for innocent life has barely been discussed in the west. It has been widely understood beyond in the Arab world and much of the global south, though, and it will not be forgotten.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
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