The International Movement for a JUST World, founded and run by Chandra Muzaffar in Malaysia, in their newsletter this week posted an article titled “Shocking Statistics on the 450th consecutive day of the genocide on the Gaza Strip,” by Mazin Qumsiyeh, a Palestinian scientist and author, who is the founder and director of the Palestine Museum of Natural History and the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability at Bethlehem University, where he teaches. The article is reproduced here in full:
Shocking Statistics
By Mazin Qumsiyeh
The Palestinian Government Media Office published an update on the most important statistics (deemed reliable even by the UN, WHO and even U.S.A.). PLEASE READ and disseminate that Israeli occupation forces (with U.S. tax money and munitions and to a lesser extent other countries) did this:
- Dropped 88,000 tons of explosives on the Gaza Strip (more than dropped on Vietnam, and four times the explosive power of a Hiroshima-size nuclear bomb in an area of a mere 360 sq km or 250 square mile)
- Committed 9,973 massacres (killing many people at one time by bombing or shelling; 70% women and children)
- 56,714 killed and missing persons: 45,514 reached hospitals (Ministry of Health recorded), 11,200 missing persons did not reach hospitals (under rubble or bodies missing). Those killed and documented include:
• 1,413 Palestinian whole families gone (no surviving members) while 3,467 Palestinian families had only one surviving family member, and the number of members of these families is 7,941 martyrs. (Ministry of Health).
• 17,818 children killed (most under age of 5 years, 238 infants were born and killed n the period of the genocide).
• 12,287 women killed
• 1068 from the medical staff (Ministry of Health).
• 94 civil defense/first responders and 728 police officers (civil)
• 201 journalists (higher than those killed in WWII)
• 520 exhumed from seven mass graves on grounds of targeted hospitals.
- The numbers do not include those dying from lack of food, medicine, water, from diseases and from cold. Specifically
+ 44 children were recorded starved to death, many hundreds are not recorded
+ Six infants died from hypothermia in tents, many hundreds are not recorded
+ Data do not include deaths among the 12,500 cancer patients (largely lacking treatments)
+ Data do not include deaths or debilitation from infectious diseases: 2,136,026 cases of such diseases due to displacement forcing unsanitary conditions including hepatitis, polio, skin diseases, lung disorders, intestinal disorders (Ministry of Health)
+ + Data do not include deaths or debilitation from chronic disease patients (350,000 patients such as diabetes) due to the occupation preventing the entry of medicines or allowing operation of facilities like kidney dialysis
- 108,189 wounded and injured arrived at hospitals including 399 journalists and media professionals), 12,650 wounded need to travel abroad for treatment. (Ministry of Health)
- 21 displacement centers (declared “safe zones") targeted by the Israeli occupation (only 10% of the area of the Gaza Strip is claimed by the Israeli occupation to be “humanitarian areas")
- 35,060 children live without their parents or without one of them (orphans).
- 12,125 women lost their husbands during the genocidal war.
