https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/22/gaza-children-death-toll-israel-hamas
some sentences for those that can’t read as have to register
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
This truce is welcome but the widespread destruction of infrastructure will mean people keep dying long after the bombs stop falling.