How many more will die in Gaza?

Image: Tasnim News Agency, Wikimedia Commons

Recently, a figure of 186,000 projected deaths in Gaza has been circulating in the press and on social media. This horrifying death toll originated from a letter to The Lancet, the most prominent British medical journal, which the Israeli regime and its Western cheerleaders have attempted to discredit as baseless ‘blood libel’. In fact, when months of relentless bombing are combined with the malnutrition and disease caused by Israel’s blockade, this figure might end up being tragically conservative.

Standing before the US Congress, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received multiple standing ovations by claiming that, in the besieged city of Rafah, civilian casualties are “practically none”, and that “Israel got the civilians out of harm's way”.

This barefaced lie makes a mockery of the hellish situation on the ground.

For the last 300 days, the Israeli military has smashed Gaza with a total firepower equivalent to multiple nuclear bombs. As a result, over 56 percent of its buildings have been reduced to dust and more than 90 percent of the 1.9 million Palestinians in the Strip have been internally displaced, many repeatedly.

Nowhere in Gaza is "out of harm's way.” 86 percent of Gaza is now under evacuation orders, and Israel has systematically bombed the areas it has declared ‘safe’.

Official estimates from Gaza’s ministry of health put the death toll at a staggering 39,000. This is only the confirmed casualties. Many more are likely to be identified in the coming months – either dug out of rubble or identified by their severed limbs. 10,000 are estimated to be buried beneath the rubble, unaccounted for in the death toll The majority of these are women, children and the elderly. More than 20,000 children are simply missing, their whereabouts unknown, a truly horrifying fact. And those refugees who survive will face Israel’s indirect weapons of war.

As The Lancet letter notes:

“Even if the conflict ends immediately, there will continue to be many indirect deaths in the coming months and years from causes such as reproductive, communicable, and non-communicable diseases. The total death toll is expected to be large given the intensity of this conflict; destroyed health-care infrastructure; severe shortages of food, water, and shelter; the population's inability to flee to safe places; and the loss of funding to UNRWA, one of the very few humanitarian organisations still active in the Gaza Strip.”

‘Direct’ and ‘indirect deaths’

The letter notes that, in urban sieges, indirect deaths – those caused by hunger, the spread of disease, birth defects, and environmental catastrophes – range from three to 15 times the number of ‘direct deaths.’

Already, international observers report that piles of war and hospital waste, polluted sewage, contaminated water, and rising temperatures are creating a perfect storm for the spread of disease. Cholera, typhoid, and measles are rising alongside scabies and tuberculosis. 100,000 cases of Hepatitis B have been reported in Gaza, compared to just 85 last year.

Official estimates from Gaza’s ministry of health put the death toll at a staggering 39,000 / Image: Tasnim News Agency, Wikimedia Commons

The letter speculates that these various factors could raise Gaza’s death toll to 186,000, assuming four times as many indirect as compared to direct deaths. This is clearly at the low end of the scale. The number of ‘indirect deaths’ will rise further should Israel maintain – or tighten – its starvation blockade. One official close to Netanyahu has already told The Economist that the Zionist regime intends to do exactly this: “Until Hamas is gone, nobody is going to come in.”

The IDF is also planning to flood Gaza’s tunnels. This will almost certainly destroy its main aquifer and massively increase the risk of new and wider disease outbreaks.

These projections also assume that an end to Israel's slaughter is around the corner. True, Gaza is running low on schools and hospitals to level and civilians to murder. But Israeli imperialism is not satiated. Above all, Netanyahu’s aim is to keep up the fighting in order to remain in power.

Accordingly, in Gaza, Netanyahu insists the siege will continue until it has succeeded in destroying Hamas and its support network – an ambiguous aim that has no clear end. Simultaneously, it is why Netanyahu is now also pivoting towards war in Lebanon.

‘Eliminate everything’

Some Zionist organisations have tried to rebuke these projections for supposedly “failing” to distinguish between deliberately starving Palestinian ‘combatants’ and deliberately starving Palestinian civilians. Both would constitute war crimes.

This criticism is especially disgusting given that Israeli officials have said repeatedly that they see no meaningful distinction between ‘combatants’ and civilians.

The group Law For Palestine has compiled more than 500 cases of Israeli officials making this explicit.

In the lead up to the siege, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant promised to “eliminate everything” / Image: IDF Flickr

For example, in the lead up to the siege, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant promised to “eliminate everything.”

Similarly, Israeli president Isaac Herzog told a press conference shortly after 7 October: “It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved… It is an entire nation out there that is responsible.”

Beyond these statements, the Gaza 2035 plan released by Israel’s Prime Minister’s office leaves little room for confusion. It vows to rebuild Gaza as a permanent Zionist outpost – “from nothing.”

For years, the IDF has also explicitly included terrorising civilian areas and, inevitably, civilians under the so-called Dahiya doctrine.

And, late last fall, a confidential Dutch Defense attaché in Tel Aviv observed that the Israeli army fully "intends to deliberately cause massive destruction to infrastructure and civilian centers.”

More recently, Ret. Major General Giora Eiland – a current advisor to Israel’s Defense Minister – suggested the IDF welcomes the risk of a humanitarian disaster – if it helps the IDF win.

“The international community warns us of a humanitarian disaster in Gaza and of severe epidemics. We must not shy away from this, as difficult as that may be. After all, severe epidemics in the south of the Gaza Strip will bring victory closer.”

To this point, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich also insists that starving the roughly two million Palestinians in Gaza "to death" is the "right and moral" thing to do – if the Israeli state can manage it.

This is an open statement of genocidal intent, and an admission that Israel cannot maintain its rule over Gaza and over the Palestinian people without massacring civilians and ‘combatants’ indiscriminately.

Israeli imperialism, aided by the United States, Canada, and Britain, has brutalised the Palestinian people for over 75 years. It has forced the Palestinians out, at gunpoint, from most of historic Palestine, and has sought to make their every last Palestinian enclave unlivable. This is not a ‘blood libel’, it is a statement of fact.

Sweep away the imperialists

With the Western powers standing behind it, ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ has transformed Gaza into a living nightmare.

Imperialism cannot help but create new Gazas / Image: Fars Media Corporation, Wikimedia Commons

This smoking graveyard, which has cost an estimated $62 billion to create, shows exactly what capitalist civilisation has to offer. Imperialism cannot help but create new Gazas, new smoking graveyards, across the world.

However, the imperialists that have backed Israel, are playing a dangerous game. In spite of the attempts of the ruling class to bury the truth (including by murdering a record number of journalists), these atrocities have been carried out brazenly, and broadcast around the world.

This has not failed to have an effect. On every continent, ordinary people are seeing that they and the Palestinians – some of the most oppressed people on Earth – have a common enemy. Last year we saw university occupations explode around the world in solidarity with Gaza. Millions have taken to the streets to protest their governments’ complicity in the massacre.

In order to successfully disarm and overthrow these war criminals, the growing anger and radicalisation must be harnessed and organised. It must be directed into a genuinely revolutionary current that can free Gaza by toppling the regimes that fund and abet the Israeli war machine.

The bloodstained Zionist state must be brought down, along with all the despots in the Middle East, by a revolutionary tide uniting all the workers and youth of the region.