US Doctors Estimate Israel Has Killed Off 5% of Gaza in a Year, 118,000 People.

99 American physicians and nurses who volunteered in Gaza in the past year have sent an open letter to the White House describing the horrors they witnessed and calling for an end to US arms for the Israeli onslaught.

The letter tries to paint an impression of the atrocity taking place, but also to quantify its scale. They recount that:

• 41,495 bodies of Palestinians killed by bombs and bullets have been recovered. Of these 83 percent or 34,344 have been fully identified. (58 percent of the identified are not military-age males, 33 percent —11,355 — are children.)
• By May it was estimated estimated that at least 10,000 additional bodies are still buried in the rubble.
• At least 62,413 have died of famine. The calculation for this is thus. Throughout the year the USAID-funded IPC has been classifying different areas of Gaza as being affected by Phase 4 and Phase 5 food availability crises. According to the IPC technical manual in a Phase 4 crisis 1-2 malnutrition deaths are expected daily per 10,000 people, and in a Phase 5 crisis at least 2 deaths are expected daily per 10,000 affected. Thus taking the number of people affected by the declared crises, dividing by 10,000, multiplying by the IPC-expected deaths per 10,000 and multiplying by the duration in days, thus produces a starvation death estimate. It should be pointed out that in making the calculations the letter signatories were multiplying by the lowest possible mortality rates allowed by the IPC classifications. That is 1 death per 10,000 for Phase 4, and 2 per 10,000 for Phase 5. Thus 62,413 is the absolute lowest number that this method produces. Using the middle rates of 1.5 and 3 deaths per 10,000 would produce an estimate of over 90,000. (I feel using the low rates early on in a famine is reasonable, since people generally start with fat storages that can help them survive for up to 12-18 months even when heavily caloric-intake deficient. )
• Due to lack of access to clean water and treatment, additional excess deaths are sure to have occurred due to infectious diseases like diarrhea and respiratory infections, but the signatories do not have the data to provide an estimate.
• Another 5000 deaths are estimated due to disruption of care for chronic disease and cancers, eg diabetes patients who can’t get the needed dialysis treatment.

Combining all of these produces a conservative floor of an estimated 118,908 deaths or 5.4 percent of the population.

5 percent loss in a year is already staggering.*

But let’s think about it more. Of the 62,000 starvation deaths most would have been among young children. So let’s say that means 45,000 malnutrition deaths among young children, on top of the 14,000 violent deaths among children (11,355 identified and 3,000+ still under the rubble). That would be 59,000 dead children in a year. 66,000 children were expected to be born in Gaza in 2023. So in other words this would mean that the Israeli onslaught has removed approximately the same number of children from the living, as were added through birth.

Until now I assumed the description of Netanyahu’s offensive by pro-Palestinians as “genocidal” was probably tendentious, but if in a year the same number of children are made to perish, as were brought into the world, that is indeed flirting with genocide. Maintain such a squeeze for long enough and the affected population bereft of children will age out and disappear.

Or think about it this way, of the young children affected by malnutrition, the worst hit by far will be infants under 1 year old. What if the 62,000 famine deaths means 30,000 deaths among the newborn? That would mean that — not even counting the deaths among other children and adults — Netanyahu is arranging for the deaths of one-half of all the newborn in the enemy population. Is that half a genocide?

But if these deaths by themselves are horrific, then what to say of the support Netanyahu has received to keep on inflicting them? The US just sent another $8.7 billion to Israel, while Germany spent the entire year perfecting repression of pro-Palestinian activists and protestors. It’s one thing for the settler state to be organizing mass death for the natives, but what’s the big idea behind the West being eager to dip its fingers in the blood as well?

After 2.5 years of war the UN counts over 11,700 civilian deaths in Ukraine, mostly by Russian firepower. Netanyahu has inflicted 110,000 in a year. Yugoslavia was bombed over the Račak “massacre” which killed 45 people (KLA killed in a battle.) Netanyahu arranges for the destruction of 60,000 children — the entire annual natural gain of Gaza — and he receives a radical increase in handouts, and a US military deployment to shield him from the consequences. This is of course on the heels of DC and friends destroying 180,000 people with blockade-famine in Yemen 2015-2022, and hundreds of thousands in Iraq 1991-2003.

Excerpts from the letter:

• “With only marginal exceptions, everyone in Gaza is sick, injured, or both. This includes every national aid worker, every international volunteer, and probably every Israeli hostage: every man, woman, and child.”
• “In Gaza we watched malnourished mothers feed their underweight newborns infant formula made with poisonous water. We can never forget that the world abandoned these innocent women and babies.“
• “Israel is concentrating a sick and malnourished population, constituted mainly of children, onto little more than a beach with no running water or even toilets available to it. In these conditions epidemics are virtually guaranteed and will be absolutely devastating, resulting in tens of thousands more dead, most of them young children. There is absolutely no reason for the world to let this happen.”
• “Children are universally considered innocents in armed conflict. However, every single signatory to this letter saw children in Gaza who suffered violence that must have been deliberately directed at them. Specifically, every one of us who worked in an emergency, intensive care, or surgical setting treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head or chest on a regular or even a daily basis. It is impossible that such widespread shooting of young children throughout Gaza, sustained over the course of an entire year is accidental or unknown to the highest Israeli civilian and military authorities.“
• “Those of us who worked with pregnant women regularly saw stillbirths and maternal deaths that were easily preventable in any developing country’s healthcare system. The rate of infection in C-section incisions was astonishing. Women underwent vaginal deliveries and even C-sections without anesthesia and were given nothing but Tylenol afterwards because no other pain medications were available.”
• “As we met our healthcare colleagues in Gaza it was clear that they were malnourished, and both physically and mentally devastated. We quickly learned that our Palestinian healthcare colleagues were among the most traumatized people in Gaza, and perhaps in the entire world. Like virtually all people in Gaza they had lost family members and their homes. Most lived in and around their hospitals with their surviving family in unimaginable conditions. Although they continued working a grueling schedule, they had not been paid since October 7. All were acutely aware that their work as healthcare providers had marked them as targets for Israel. This makes a mockery of the protected status hospitals and healthcare providers are granted under the oldest and most widely accepted provisions of International Humanitarian Law.”
• “We appreciate that you are working on a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, but you have overlooked an obvious fact: the United States can impose a ceasefire on the warring parties by simply stopping arms shipments to Israel,”
• 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.

US medical volunteers of Palestinian descent are blocked by Israel from working in Gaza.

How accurate are these numbers, especially the starvation death estimate? I don’t know, but these are the numbers that we do have, and thus until better ones come along are the most accurate numbers that we have to go on. If anyone has a better estimate, or a critique of the current one please do come forward. A part of the problem is precisely that so few are interested in studying the issue for obvious reasons. Washington and London do not miss the chance to update the press on how many Russians their intel agencies would like us to think have perished in Ukraine, but on the Palestinian losses they engage in total silence that speaks volumes.

A Lancet study from July estimated the death toll could be 186,000. (Personally, I’m not in love with its methodology, it’s not much better than a guess.) In February the Johns Hopkins Center and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in a massive 57-page study projected that from February 7 until August 6, at current levels of violence and aid restrictions, there would occur approximately 66,720 excess deaths (violent and indirect), or anywhere between 48,210 and 193,180 when accounting for uncertainty. (67,000 in six months would mean approximately 133,000 for twelve months, generally in line with the US Gaza doctors’ estimate of 118,000.)

*That is the kind of loss that would have been sustained in the first year of exile by deported peoples in the 1940s Soviet Union under Stalin, when 10 nationalities accused of disloyalty were forcefully transported and dumped into resettlement camps in Siberia and Central Asia. (Their total losses were about 10 percent, but the first year of exile was the worst by far.)