According to veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, the situation in Gaza is increasingly turning into mass death for Palestinians. In an article posted yesterday, Hersh reports that the official death figures grossly understate the reality in Gaza, not only the numbers put out by Israel, but also those of Gaza’s Health Ministry. “[T]here are many senior analysts in the international human rights and social science community who consider these numbers to be hokum: a vast underestimate of the damage that has been done to a terrorized civilian population living in makeshift tents and shelters amid disease and malnutrition, with a lack of sanitation, medical care, and medicines as well as increasing desperation and fatigue,” Hersh writes.
“In days of telephone and email exchanges with public health and statistical experts in America I found a general belief that the civilian death toll in Gaza, both from the bombings and their aftermath, had to be significantly higher than reported, but none of the scientists and statisticians—appropriately—was willing to say so in print because of a lack of access to accurate data. I also asked one well-informed American official what he thought the actual civilian death count in Gaza might be and he answered, without pause: ‘We just don’t know.’”
Hersh quotes one public health expert saying: “No clear and definite body count is possible, given the continuing Israeli bombing.” He added, caustically, “How many bombs does it take to kill a human being?”
“What the fuck is wrong with the international medical community?” he asked. “Who are we kidding? Without a ceasefire, a million people are going to starve. This is not a debating point. How can you count something when the system is biting its own tail.” He was referring to the fact that the health system in Gaza—its hospitals and service agencies—"is being targeted and shattered” by Israeli aircraft and that those responsible for the counting of the dead and injured “are themselves dead.”
Other data, Hersh reports, suggest that the published death figures are seriously misleading. Save the Children, an international child protection agency, issued a report this month estimating that as many as 21,000 children in Gaza are “trapped beneath rubble, detained, buried in unmarked graves, or lost from their families.” Other children, the agency said, “have been forcibly disappeared, including an unknown number detained and forcibly transferred out of Gaza” with their whereabouts unknown to the families “amidst reports of ill-treatment and torture.”
Jeremy Stoner, the charity’s regional director for the Middle East, said: “Gaza has become a graveyard for children, with thousands of others missing, their fates unknown…. We desperately need a ceasefire to find and support the missing children who have survived, and to prevent more families from being destroyed.”
