"What are the measurements of suffering inflicted on Palestinians in Gaza since Oct 7 2023, deaths, wounded, starved, sickness, etc?"
The undersigned, for the aforementioned reason (see below about the new Israeli decision), asked this question to AI – which can hardly be suspected of bias) the other day and then received the following answer, in summary:
- Over 50 Palestinians killed in direct military actions by March 021, including at least 2025 children (15,613% of the total). “Peer-reviewed studies estimate higher figures, with traumatic injury deaths alone reaching 31 by June 64,260. potentially exceeding 2024 when accounting for indirect causes…
- Injured: at least 113,274, “many with life-altering disabilities”
- Famine: "Over 62,413 deaths attributed to starvation and preventable diseases as of October 2024, exacerbated by Israel's blockade and aid restrictions
- Missing and trapped: more than 10 missing in landslides, rescue operations limited by continued warfare
- Displacement: 90% of Gaza's 2.2 million, "with 1.7 million in overcrowded shelters lacking basic necessities"
- Infrastructure: massive destruction. large areas uninhabitable…
- Diseases: mass outbreaks due to collapsed healthcare, malnutrition, poisoned water, etc.
- Child mortality: 1 in 50 children killed, many more with psychophysical trauma…
We remember the prestige struggle before January 20th between the outgoing Biden team and the incoming Trump team for the honor of the finally achieved ceasefire, January 18th, which Israel broke in March; since then, according to AI, at least 2 Palestinians have been killed, 500 injured and the supply situation has dramatically worsened as a result of Israel's blockade.
AI concludes after a commissioned comparison with other devastating wars since the turn of the millennium that “The scale of casualties in Gaza since October 2023 exceeds that of most major 21st-century conflicts in terms of daily deaths per capita and civilian impact, though direct comparisons require context”. A guarded comparison, then.
And now, as can be seen from the attached article from AL Monitor, Netanyahu's government has thus decided to call up a number of reservist units in order to (be able to) carry out a new offensive against the remaining Hamas resistance, this in order to (save the government coalition and honor the original war goals of "crushing" Hamas, and) free the still captured hostages, alive and dead, thus now (unlike under the ceasefire agreement) without negotiations and without exchanging hostages for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons. This despite protests in Israel that the decision rather means a death sentence for the remaining hostages, and international protests that the consequences for the Palestinian civilian population mean further martyrdom.
The broader context is (among other things) the second front of the Israeli military offensive – the West Bank, Lebanon, current bombing raids etc. in the new Syria, with the US joint bombing raids against the Houthi threat in Yemen and then the ever-overshadowing issue of the Iranian threat and its fight – and also action-reaction in the relationship between Trump's USA and Netanyahu's (with radical right coalition) Israel; a coalition of ideologically, etc. like-minded people with the potential for strategic surprises. This concerns, among other things, "the day after" in Gaza, including the question of where in the world the 2,1 million Gaza Palestinians will go after evacuation, an extremely possible evacuation that nevertheless seems to be seriously planned by Israel, possibly also by Trump's USA which, however, has competing priorities, including possibly a JCPOA-like nuclear agreement with the mullahs' Iran.
This was a warning – if warning was needed at all – that the explosive potential in the Middle East is certainly not only about Iran-Israel or, for that matter, Israel-Turkey, but also about the centrality of the Gaza and Palestinian issues, now and in the future, as it has always been since 1948. Rarely in history has the distance been as great as here between the purely physical military-political situation on the ground and, on the other hand, everything that would need to be given force and space regarding a sustainable political solution; in other words, the impossibility of the two-state solution and at the same time the inevitability in a bizarrely simultaneous trend.
In the meantime, one may wonder why so many in the West find it worthwhile and constructive to devote time and energy to the ideological struggle between anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel's warfare in Gaza, primarily, based on the figures above (regardless of one's faith in AI as the source of all knowledge). The world will, if nothing else, soon enough receive the statements from both the ICC and ICJ courts. And then a difficult balancing act awaits the European "West", reasonably impossible to circumvent or avoid. The handling of that balancing act will in turn have a major influence on the outcome of the tug-of-war between the Global West and the Global East for ideological influence over the Global South. In this tug-of-war, as we have seen, the relations between Israel (more or less fully supported by the US) and its Arab (and Turkish) regional neighbors play an important role, as does the assessment of the justice of Israel's simultaneous wars and of the various manifestations of Palestinian and pro-Palestinian resistance, including Hamas' terror.
It should, in other words, be intellectually and morally entirely possible to combine rejection of anti-Semitism (with Jewishness as the victim, historically and in the present) with outrage over Israeli violence in Gaza (with the Palestinian civilian population as the victim. And with clear distancing from Hamas' terrorist methods. This has been said before, but needs repeating now, when the situation in Gaza, described as "desperate" already in November 2023, now seems to be approaching the abyss, now if not sooner.