Skewering History : The Truth About the Scale of Genocide in Gaza
A recent report entitled Skewering History: The Odious Politics of Counting Gaza’s Dead, written by Richard Hill (Professor at Griffith University, Australia) and Gideon Polya (Biochemist at Trobe University, Australia), deals squarely with the human cost of what is going on in Gaza.
They point out that given the restrictions on the press within Israel and the deliberate targeting of journalists working in the Gaza Strip, vital information on the conflict, on the destruction of Gaza and its people, is at best skewed. Information on the death toll is given daily by the Gaza Health Ministry, but this report argues that in the densely populated urban confines of Gaza accurate figures are hard to come by.
For example, they argue that “The independent charity Save the Children, estimates that there may be up to 20,000 children buried under 51 million tons of rubble. There are also countless unidentified bodies and missing persons. So relentless has been Israel’s bombardment that accessing corpses has been difficult, if not impossible.”
The report points out that in Gaza’s catastrophic circumstances where hospitals and other medical facilities are subject to regular and intense attacks, it is very difficult for staff to keep accurate records despite the administrators making every effort to record every wounded person occupying a bed and every dead body arriving at a morgue.
The true estimates, the report says, are many more: “the actual death toll was likely to be much higher given the exclusion of non-trauma deaths resulting from the destruction of health care facilities, food insecurity and lack of water and sanitation.” And they claim that “it is necessary to estimate the number of non-violent deaths resulting from war-imposed deprivation.”
No comparison
Based on studies carried out on non-violent deaths in previous wars such as Iraq and Afghanistan, the report claims that Gazan deaths are about 12-14 times greater than the official death toll. One example of many involves the severe impact on breastfeeding. Breastfeeding is almost impossible for highly traumatised mothers, for mothers who are also denied access to water, food, shelter, hygiene, baby bottles, baby formula, electricity, sanitation and other life saving requisites.
Given all these circumstances the report says the death toll of Gazans could be as high as 680,000 killed by both violence and imposed deprivation. This sort of analysis is very unlikely to make its way into the mainstream media but confirmation of the scale of the Gazan death toll unwittingly came from none other than Donald Trump.
With all the access he has to top intelligence, in May this year when speaking of his plans for the Riviera of the Middle East, he referred to the 1.7 million Gazans he wanted totally removed from the enclave to develop his plan. The pre-conflict population of Gaza was 2.4 million and Trump’s figure would fit with up to 700,000 Gazans having been killed or made disappear. And it is a figure that he has used several times.
Ignoring or masking the real death toll of civilians in war is not uncommon. But if the death toll is even close to as high as the report claims, then as IIan Pappe says, “The ethnic cleansing of Palestine must become rooted in our memory and consciousness as a crime against humanity.”
We are living through this criminal act and must act now. It is up to us, as the millions involved in the Global Palestine movement have shown, to increase the pressure on the US, the EU, the UK – and our own Irish government – to break all ties with Israel. We need to follow the example of Italian and Greek dock workers and show our power as workers to force our government to stop funding the genocide in Gaza. The incredible strength and imagination of resistance shown by the movement up to now must be escalated to stop the suffering and number of deaths in Gaza that this report so powerfully reveals.
