By Phillip Brewer
The official death toll in Gaza rose to 30,534 as of today, March 4, 2024. That’s according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Many news reports of the tally start by saying, “According to the Gaza Health Ministry, the death toll stands at…” I don’t say it that way because all too often it’s a lie. It’s not the Gaza Health Ministry that’s lying. I have no doubt that they are not exaggerating the figure. In fact, it is almost certainly significantly higher than that. It’s just that, given the accelerated pace of death, the historic chaos, the breakdown in communications, and the destruction of the healthcare system, the best they can do is to say that there are at least 30,534 dead since the beginning of the war.
Fars Photo of Casualties in Gaza Strip during 2023 War
Even calling it a war is kind of a lie. It’s more like shooting fish in a barrel, only the fish are the 2 million Gazans who have been kettled into a limited space in the southern portion of the territory. If you’re not familiar with the word “kettle” as a verb, it’s what the New York City Police do when there’s a demonstration and they’ve decided to arrest everybody so they surround them on every side and announce that they are part of an “illegal assembly” and they will be arrested if they don’t disperse. The ones who try to leave find that there’s no escape. They’ve been kettled. And everyone gets arrested.
The NYPD learned this technique through police training exchanges in Israel where the police and IDF have had decades to perfect their crowd suppression techniques on Palestinians using brutal techniques with impunity. Thousands of American peace officers have participated and were exposed to techniques and products designed to subdue the masses. One such product is known as Skunk, a foul-smelling liquid that induces vomiting and persists for days on the skin and is now being sold to US police departments by an American company Mistral Security. But back to the dead.
The reason that leading the latest death toll with the phrase “according to the Gaza Health Ministry is that it can be used to imply that the number is false because of its source. As I said above it is if anything higher than the official number. Conditions in Gaza are so bad that the living are forced to bury the dead very near where they find them so they are never reported to the hospital or any authority. The death toll is almost certainly an undercount on that basis alone. But there are other reasons.
In fact there are four categories of the dead in Gaza: the counted dead, the uncounted dead, the missing dead, and the living dead.
The counted dead are the ones who have been reported to an authority. They constitute the 30,534 number.
The uncounted dead are the ones who have been seen, who are clearly dead, perhaps severely mutilated, and who have been hastily buried without being reported to the health ministry. At this point there are probably 5000 or so.
The missing dead are, for the most part, the ones who have either been crushed in collapsing buildings making their bodies inaccessible and the ones who were vaporized in the near vicinity of a bomb or rocket and for which there are no identifiable remains. These are estimated to be another 5 to 10,000.
And finally, the biggest group, the living dead:
In cooperation with the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, the London school of hygiene and tropical medicine published a report on February 19 which predicts levels of further death depending on three circumstances: 1) Immediate Ceasefire, 2) Continued attacks, and 3) Escalation. According to this study, even if there were an immediate cease-fire with no further hostilities of any kind, there are approximately 30 to 40,000 people who as the result of untreated injuries or illness have no hope of survival and will die at some point over the next six months. The living dead. This includes children and adults who are in an advanced stage of starvation and whose digestive tract can no longer absorb nutrients. It includes cancer patients who were in remission or stabilization but whose treatment was interrupted to the point that their cancers have progressed to the point of no longer being treatable.
The point of all this is to say that the reported number of deaths in Gaza is probably significantly less than half of the actual number. Remember that, especially when it is suggested that the reported number is falsely high. It is not. It is clearly falsely low. We will find out the true number someday when the number of dead and missing are compared to the Gazan identity registry. The number will be staggering.