The latest numbers from Gaza’s Health Ministry put the number of Palestinians killed by Israel in Gaza since October 7, 2023, at 41,788. The ministry’s figures only count the bodies that are brought to hospitals and morgues and don’t account for people missing and presumed dead under the rubble.
The healthcare workers said they believe the true death toll in Gaza is much higher than what Gaza’s Health Ministry is reporting, estimating it to be over 118,908.
“It is likely that the death toll from this conflict is already greater than 118,908, an astonishing 5.4% of Gaza’s population.”
Only 5.4% Apparently Israel needs US cluster bombs.
“The 99 signatories to this letter spent a combined 254 weeks inside Gaza’s largest hospitals and clinics. We wish to be absolutely clear: not once did any of us see any type of Palestinian militant activity in any of Gaza’s hospitals or other healthcare facilities,” the letter reads.
LOL
On other threads the argument was that one could not trust the Gaza Health Ministry numbers because it was run by Hamas and was considered a lying inflation of number of dead. Now we find that indeed that ministry’s numbers are wrong. They are much higher.
How about if Israel would return the land it stole from the Palestinians?
When I began studying Israeli history more than a quarter of a century ago, people claiming to be experts proffered plenty of excuses to explain why Israelis should not be held responsible for the 1948 ethnic cleansing of some 750,000 Palestinians from their homes — what Palestinians call their Nakba, or Catastrophe.
1. I was told most Israelis were not involved and knew nothing of the war crimes carried out against the Palestinians during Israel’s establishment.
2.I was told that those Israelis who did take part in war crimes, like Operation Broom to expel Palestinians from their homeland, did so only because they were traumatised by their experiences in Europe. In the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, these Israelis assumed that, were the Jewish people to survive, they had no alternative but to drive out the Palestinians en masse.
3.From others, I was told that no ethnic cleansing had taken place. The Palestinians had simply fled at the first sign of conflict because they had no real historical attachment to the land.
4.Or I was told that the Palestinians’ displacement was an unfortunate consequence of a violent war in which Israeli leaders had the best interests of Palestinians at heart. The Palestinians hadn’t left because of Israeli violence but because they had been ordered to do so by Arab leaders in the region.
In fact, the story went, Israel had pleaded with many of the 750,000 refugees to come home afterwards, but those same Arab leaders stubbornly blocked their return.
Every one of these claims was nonsense, directly contradicted by all the documentary evidence.
That should be even clearer today, as Israel continues the ethnic cleansing and slaughter of the Palestinian people more than 75 years on.
A skilled propagandist would brush the volunteer’s numbers away with “they are obviously biased, because they volunteered to help Pals, instead of Israelis, so their numbers are more “fake news””.
Very Very TRUE!
Why is that?
Maybe because what we read in the main stream media is a lie. They support the US government agenda. They are full in on supporting the US government. They are in effect the Pravda organ of the US government.
Chris Hedges formally of the NYTimes is an example.
He reported on the Middle East for the NYTimes for 7 years and is an Arabic speaker. He was based out of Cairo but report quite a bit on Gaza as the Jerusalem bureau followed the Israeli line.
He would report on the Israeli violence upon the Palestinians. His news story would be “edited” by insertion of IDF report regarding the the attack reducing the report to a “he said”; “she said” story.
He was frustrated and took a vacation and spend 10 days in Palestinians refugees camp making operations and not interviewing Palestinian residents for Palestinian officials. He turned that story to the NYTimes. Management response. “You will never cover the Middle East again!” He was moved to other duties but Iraq War Redeux [2003] came up. So they sent him. He attached himself to a US Marine unit responsible of uncovering Iraqi WMDs. Only artillery shells containing chemical weapons were found. He reported on that. And began speaking out on the “unnecessary” war. His recorded phone messages at the NYTimes was filled with death threats along with the written death threats. It came to a head when he was booed off the stage at a commencement speech. Was the audience upset because of the subject was inappropriate for the occasion or because they believed it was a “necessary” war?
In any case, management yanked into the assistant managing editor and given a written warning that he was never to speak publicly on the subject again subject to dismissal/firing. He said that never was going to happen. So he was gone.
A few days ago he wrote about a movie: “Olive Trees Weep”
The Olive Trees Weepoffers a rare view into the everyday experience and psychological ramifications of occupation.
Filmed in 2022 in the West Bank, the film follows Palestinian journalist and therapist Ashira Darwish, Israeli journalist Amira Haas, activists Ahed Tamimi, Dr. Gabor Maté, and others.
Consequently, the Palestinian experience is marked ubiquitously by violence and loss, and by the constant fear of further violence.
For children in Gaza and the West Bank, “being in the hands of the divine” becomes a safer, easier option than life under occupation. Amidst endless loss, “death is a celebration also because you’re going home to your beloveds.”
As Palestinians embrace death, so do they embrace life.
John Wight, an independent journalist & pod caster, had this to say about October 7.
The Hamas incursion was less Israel’s 9/11 and more a Palestinian Tet Offensive, says John Wight. No ugly oppression has ever given rise to a pretty resistance.
It was a scream from the bowels of structural oppression, a reassertion of the self-respect Fanon recognized in the violence of a colonized and oppressed people. It was, in sum, the killing rage of those who refuse to accept the status of an unpeople.
In the spirit of Geronimo, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. In the spirit of the Mau Mau, the spirit of Irish revolutionary leader James Connolly of Easter Rising 1916 fame. In the spirit of Bobby Sands and the other Irish Hunger Strikers who gave their lives for freedom in 1981. In the spirit of every anti-colonial resistance movement and struggle there has ever been, the Palestinians of Gaza on Oct.7, 2023, dared to say ”No!”
Who is Fanon? https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/frantz-fanon/ Born on the island of Martinique under French colonial rule, Frantz Omar Fanon (1925–1961) was one of the most important writers in black Atlantic theory in an age of anti-colonial liberation struggle. Frantz Fanon: “Violence,” he once wrote,
“frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.”
The Palestinians for sure have been ignored & used by their Arab brethren. But it was the Israeli that forced them from their homes.
This conflict does end without a “final solution” of the Palestinians.
The irony is that it will have to be done with Jewish hands.