On December 14th, CNN aired a devastating peek into life in the Gaza Strip.
The dispatch, from Clarissa Ward, marked the first piece of independent reporting from Gaza by a Western journalist since October 7th (all other reports by Western correspondents to date have come from people embedded with the Israeli army who had to subject their reporting to the IDFs official censor for approval).
Should other media outlets follow CNN’s lead in coming weeks, finding ways into Gaza that circumvent partisans in the conflict, presenting interviews and footage developed by and for Western audiences, the American public may come to understand the plight of Gazans through more than just statistics. In the meantime, the statistics tell a truly horrific tale.
To date, Gaza’s Health Ministry has identified at least 22,185 people who have been killed in the Israeli offensive – nearly 1 percent of Gaza’s total population of 2.3 million. Since October 7, at least 47 entire bloodlines have been wiped from Gaza’s civil registry.
Israel’s defenders have tried to downplay these numbers by emphasizing that the Gaza Health Ministry works for Hamas. This is technically true, in the same way that government employees who collected trash in Iraq technically worked for Ba’ath Party under Saddam Hussein (although formal responsibility for the Health Ministry still lies with the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank). However, this does not entail that the ministry is exaggerating the death toll. Indeed, it’s not even in Hamas’ strategic interests to cook the books – their ability to exert international pressure on Israel is completely contingent on others taking the Health Ministry’s casualty numbers seriously. Being caught engaging in major exaggerations would deprive them of the ability to undermine Israel on the world stage in this conflict and all subsequent conflicts as well.
It should therefore not be surprising that the Gaza Health Ministry numbers have proven consistently reliable. The Associated Press observes, “In the aftermath of war, the U.N. humanitarian office has published final death tolls based on its own research into medical records. In all cases the U.N.’s counts have largely been consistent with the Gaza Health Ministry’s, with small discrepancies.” Likewise, “While Israel and the Palestinians disagree over the numbers of militants versus civilians killed in past wars, Israel’s accounts of Palestinian casualties have come close to the Gaza ministry’s.”
Independent audits by U.S. media outlets and monitoring organizations also tend to match the Health Ministry’s numbers closely.
In fact, as Reuters notes, the Gaza Health Ministry estimates are likely an undercount of the total dead because there are many people who never made it to a hospital or other government facility to be identified. There are an estimated 7000 Gazans still trapped in the rubble, whose bodies may never be recovered or identified.
Israeli politicians and defense officials have repeatedly boasted about the IDF’s precise munitions and their capabilities to minimize civilian deaths. The fact that Israel has such precise targeting capabilities raises troubling questions about the huge number of casualties in this conflict among groups that are supposed to be protected under international law.
For example, the UN estimates that at least 300 health care workers have been killed in Gaza since October 7. This exceeds all other conflict-related casualties for medical professionals everywhere else in the world combined for 2023.
Additionally, more than 135 United Nations aid workers have been killed in Gaza since October 7 – the highest number killed in any conflict, anywhere in the world, since the UN was established in 1945.
At least 77 journalists have been killed to date. This is the highest number of reporter fatalities in any conflict since the Committee to Protect Journalists was founded in 1992.
Here, it can be instructive to compare the IDF’s ‘precision’ attacks stack up to Hamas’ ‘indiscriminate’ rampage.
According to revised IDF estimates, a total of 1139 deaths could be attributed to Hamas’ October 7 invasion of Israel (although many of these may have been collateral damage of Israel’s counter response). 766 of these were civilians, including 71 foreign nationals and 36 Israeli children. The remaining 373 casualties were active members of Israeli security forces or police officers. About one third of Hamas’ casualties, then, could be classified as ‘enemy forces,’ while 3 percent of the dead were children.
Although the Gaza’s Health Ministry is not able to distinguish between combatant and non-combatant casualties in the same manner as the IDF, a common practice in combat zones to simply count all fighting aged males as “enemies killed in action,” even in the absence of evidence that they were, in fact, combatants (albeit, while recognizing that a large share of men killed were likely not engaged in combat). The New York Times reports that in past conflicts between Israel and Hamas, about 60 percent of reported casualties in Gaza were men. In the current conflict, however, nearly 70 percent have been women and children.
Statistically, then, the IDF has been killing non-combatants at about same rate as Hamas on Oct. 7. The sheer scale of the slaughter is also extraordinary. According to The Times:
“Even a conservative reading of the casualty figures reported from Gaza shows that the pace of death during Israel’s campaign has few precedents in this century… More children have been killed in Gaza since the Israeli assault began than in the world’s major conflict zones combined — across two dozen countries — during all of last year, even with the war in Ukraine, according to U.N. tallies of verified child deaths in armed conflict.”
These extraordinary levels of civilian casualties are neither unavoidable nor purely accidental. According to a recent U.S. intelligence assessment, nearly half of the munitions that Israel has deployed in Gaza have been ‘dumb bombs’ – unguided munitions intended to level everything and kill everyone in a wide area indiscriminately.
However, as an investigation by +972 Magazine recently underlined, Israel’s precision munitions have often been deployed with minimal regard for non-combatants’ lives as well. The report details how the IDF is relying on a new A.I. system, “Habsora,” to identify and target anyone with ties to Hamas, regardless of whether they’re militants or not. High levels of collateral damage are often anticipated and approved in these strikes. As one Israeli whistleblower put it:
“Nothing happens by accident. When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”
The fact that the overwhelming majority of casualties of this conflict have been women, children and protected professionals (journalists, health care workers, U.N. staff) reflects political choices made by Israel’s hardline leadership more than the intrinsic difficulties of fighting a group like Hamas (which often embeds its fighters and infrastructure among civilians) or operating in a densely populated theater like Gaza.
In addition to the more than 20 thousand killed in the conflict, more than 57 thousand others have been wounded. Most have been unable to receive adequate medical care in the aftermath due to Israel bombing several medical facilities and choking off access to aid, water, fuel and the internet. Children have had to undergo surgeries without anesthesia. Babies have starved to death in hospitals after medical staff were forced to evacuate. Young people have witnessed their entire families being wiped out, and must live with the mental trauma, and struggle as orphans, for whatever time they have left.
Refugee camps have been bombed and bulldozed while people were still sheltering inside. Food convoys have been repeatedly fired upon, leading to many casualties.
Bakeries, primary schools and universities have also been targeted in the conflict – alongside libraries, courthouses and other government buildings. Churches, mosques, cemeteries and U.N. world heritage sites have been destroyed. The Wall Street Journal estimates that more than 70 percent of homes in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. Statistically, the devastation in Gaza is comparable to the Allies’ bombardment of Dresden or Cologne during WWII, or the U.S. razing of Vietnam. The Associated Press reports that the destruction has been so thorough “Gaza is now a different color from space. It’s a different texture.”
Around 80 percent of Gaza’s population has been displaced by the conflict, even as winter renders reliable shelter ever-more important. The U.N. estimates more than one quarter of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million is facing starvation.
Those who remain in areas occupied by the IDF are routinely detained without cause, often stripped of their possessions and abused despite cooperation before getting dropped off in the most dangerous sections of the country once Israel is done with them. Many abducted by the IDF are never heard from again (Israel has acknowledged that at least some of those missing perished while under IDF custody).
Meanwhile, myriad videos have emerged of Israeli soldiers looting, vandalizing and destroying the few possessions that Gazans might return to in buildings that remain, burning food to deny it to starving Gazans, humiliating non-combatants caught in the IDFs dragnet, laughing about blowing up schools and other civilian infrastructure, or even explicitly fantasizing about executing babies. These are often proudly shared on social media, with the perpetrators apparently confident that they will face no disciplinary action or social sanction for their egregious behaviors (indeed, far from being held accountable in any way, videos like these tend to rack up huge numbers of ‘likes’ and shares).
There have been myriad reports of Israeli soldiers sexually threatening, harassing, assaulting and raping Palestinian women (and sexually violating Palestinian men and boys as well), in apparent retaliation of alleged sexual atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7.
As reported by Haaretz, “The army itself apparently believes that the spirit of vengeance is important and instrumental, especially in a long war. Similarly, the looting of Gazans is an element in the vengeance dialogue that no one is concealing any longer. According to a former Education Corps officer, there are people in the army who are pleased about the ‘fostering of vengeance.’” The growing list of war crimes and abuses being perpetrated by Israeli soldiers, in other words, are not isolated incidents or occasional failures of discipline — they are being actively and systematically encouraged from the top down.
All of this has been enabled by the United States, every step of the way.
From the outset of the conflict, the Biden Administration dismissed the idea of making security assistance to Israel conditional on their ally respecting international rules and norms.
Thousands of U.S. troops and multiple U.S. carrier strike groups were deployed to the Middle East to deter regional powers from intervening in the slaughter.
To undermine diplomatic pressure on Israel, the White House repeatedly rebuked calls for a ceasefire from within the U.S., and has vetoed U.N. Security Council resolutions calling for the same (despite overwhelming support for the measure in the U.N. General Assembly).
Meanwhile, White House spokesperson John Kirby has downplayed the Gazan Health Ministry’s casualty estimates while characterizing any casualties that occurred as sad but necessary.
Tamir Pardo, former head of the Mossad (Israel’s CIA), has expressed shock at the extremity of Biden’s commitment to Netanyahu — how indifferent the U.S. posture has been so far to Israel’s conduct, America’s geopolitical interests, or Biden’s own political fortunes:
“With the outbreak of the war, the Prime Minister of Israel appealed to the President of the United States, whom the government had reviled until that day, for immediate military assistance. The President of the United States, without hesitation, began the transfer of an air and sea train of unprecedented and historic proportions. The United States gave complete backing to the State of Israel in its war. Even the prime minister’s refusal to explain how Israel wants to end the campaign has so far not undermined the dimensions of support. Even President Biden’s decline in the polls in an election year did not prevent him from providing unqualified support.”
The Biden Administration’s public advocacy for Israel has been so fierce, in fact, that even the IDF has had to tell the White House to cool it with “irresponsible” and “inaccurate” claims about Hamas.
Given carte blanche by the U.S., Netanyahu and his right-wing government have pursued a campaign to render large swaths of Gaza uninhabitable and explicitly hope to drive most of the surviving population permanently out of the Strip. The proper term for any such program is “ethnic cleansing.” It’s considered a crime against humanity under international law. Israel now faces an inquiry by the International Court of Justice on precisely these grounds. For its part, the Biden Administration has declared it strongly opposes any forced relocation of Palestinians from Gaza. However, it has not taken meaningful actions to curb Israeli violence.
Instead, reckless disregard for civilians in Gaza has given Israeli settlers a sense of impunity to attack Palestinians in the West Bank too. Nearly 300 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since October 7. An additional 1200 have been displaced due to settler violence. Assaults, threats and harassment against Palestinians have gone completely unchecked. Instead, according to U.N. estimates, Israeli security forces directly “accompanied or actively supported the attackers” in close to half of documented incidents.
The fact that Israelis can act with complete disregard for Palestinian lives, dignity and rights in Gaza and the West Bank while everyone else stands idly by (as a result of U.S. vetoes and deterrence) – this has led growing numbers of Palestinians to view Hamas as the only force that will even try to resist the slaughter, oppression and expulsion of people like themselves.
Prior to October 7, the militant group was deeply unpopular among Palestinians, and there were large public protests against them in Gaza. Since the Israeli bombing campaign and uptick in settler violence, there has been a huge surge of support for Hamas, with the biggest gains in the West Bank, where the reigning Palestinian Authority has actively suppressed protests against Israel while doing virtually nothing to defend Palestinian citizens from aggression by Israeli settlers and security forces.
Worse, in spite of the devastation wrought on Gazan civilians and civilian infrastructure, Hamas remains militarily and organizationally quite strong. Israel has estimated that they’ve killed around 8000 Hamas fighters (a number they seem to have arrived at, again, by counting virtually all male casualties as ‘Hamas’). Taking this number at face value, the overwhelming majority of Hamas’ estimated 30 to 40 thousand fighters remain after 3 months of conflict. And rather than growing weaker or less effective, Hamas has been inflicting growing losses and injuries on IDF forces in Gaza. Hamas’ tunnel system remains largely intact. And the organization has been able to capture many new weapons dropped by injured or fallen Israeli soldiers, or unexploded ordinance that can be repurposed into rockets that will be aimed back towards Israel and its forces downstream.
Politically, there seems to be no real plan for who could possibly govern Gaza other than Hamas if and when the military operation eventually winds down. In short, insofar as the goal of the campaign is to eliminate Hamas, Netanyahu seems to be presiding over an unambiguous failure.
Israel has declared that their secondary objective in Gaza is to secure the release of hostages captured by Hamas on October 7. On this front, too, the campaign has been a disaster. According to myriad reports, Hamas was distressed by the high number of hostages captured in the raid, and tried to secure their release immediately. Haim Rubinstein — co-founder of the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, whose team identified Hamas’ hostages to begin with and has advocated for their release — confirmed in the Times of Israel that “Hamas had offered on October 9 or 10 to release all the civilian hostages in exchange for the IDF not entering the Strip, but the government rejected the offer.”
They wanted revenge more than they wanted to free the hostages. In fact, not only did Israel initially refuse to come to the table, the Israeli government went so far as to declare they would not take the hostages into consideration while prosecuting their war in Gaza. Netanyahu repeatedly rejected offers to release hostages in exchange for a ceasefire, only relenting briefly after nearly two months of pressure by the hostages’ families (largely organized by the aforementioned Hostages and Missing Families Forum).
Upon release, multiple hostages condemned Netanyahu for the indiscriminate bombing of the area they were being held in. One asserted, “We were in tunnels, terrified that it would not be Hamas, but Israel, that would kill us, and then they would say Hamas killed you.” Another declared, “I was in a hideout that was bombed, and we became wounded refugees. This doesn’t even include the helicopter that fired at us on our way to Gaza.” Indeed, multiple reports and eyewitness testimonies suggest the IDF may have been responsible for large numbers of Israeli deaths during their October 7 counteroffensive.
Since October 7, nearly 1 out of 5 Israeli military casualties have been the result of friendly fire and accidents. In recent days, the IDF also murdered three hostages who’d escaped Hamas despite the fact that these hostages were shirtless, unarmed, and waving white flags. Hamas has claimed that an additional 57 hostages have been killed by Israeli airstrikes to date. This leaves an estimated 71 hostages remaining in Hamas custody.
A majority of the hostages, therefore, have either been killed (primarily by Israel itself, it seems) or remain in Hamas captivity three months into the war. Israel’s secondary objective in the campaign has also been a failure.
In the wake of Hamas’ unprecedented raid, an Israeli military response was both inevitable and (morally, politically, strategically) necessary. However, although justified under the auspices of legitimate self-defense, the campaign is being carried out in ways that do not seem to serve Israel’s needs or goals. If the objectives are to ensure the release of hostages, protect Israeli lives or eliminate Hamas (rather than collectively punishing Gazans or trying to expel them from the Strip altogether), then the military operation in Gaza has not just been ineffective, it’s been demonstrably counterproductive.
Global public sentiment against Israel is turning sharply negative as a result of the brutality of Israel’s campaign. Antisemitism is increasing against Jews worldwide, endangering many who have little to do with Israel and may not even approve of its actions in Gaza.
Within Israel, the country’s Arab population feels like they’re under siege despite the enormous grief they feel over the events of October 7 and their aftermath. Arab citizens of Israel have faced increased harassment, surveillance and conflict with their neighbors, and increased restrictions on movement. The Israeli government routinely arrests and punishes Arabs who show any sympathy for the plight of Gazans in this conflict, and has threatened to strip the citizenship of (and expel) any Arabs who seem insufficiently loyal to the state. Thousands of Palestinian guest workers have already been deported into Gaza’s war zone since the start of the conflict. Israel’s Arab citizens live in fear of joining them for any misstep – a dynamic that is likely unhealthy for Israel’s long-term civic and security interests.
U.S. strategic interests in the Middle East have been dramatically undermined as well. American installations and forces have come under attack throughout the region as a result of the U.S. role in the conflict. U.S. brokered efforts to normalize relations between Israel and other Arab states have been indefinitely scuttled. Meanwhile, despite America’s expressed commitment to a two-state solution, Israeli officials have publicly rejected any possibility of a Palestinian state in any conceivable future.
It is within America’s power to force a change of course on all of these dimensions. As retired IDF Major General Yitzhak Brick recently emphasized:
“All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability… Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”
So far, however, the Biden Administration has declined to exercise this leverage. Instead, he makes constant entreaties to Netanyahu that the Israeli Prime Minister consistently ignores. As Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) put it, “At every juncture, Netanyahu has given Biden the finger… They are pleading with the Netanyahu coalition, but getting slapped in the face over and over again.”
Netanyahu and his hardline allies are not exactly the type who respond to pleading — especially not when the White House seems unwilling or unable to impose any type of cost on Israel for its posture or behaviors.
Facing high profile resignations and an internal revolt, the State Department has slow walked the sale of M16 assault rifles pending assurances that they won’t end up in the hands of West Bank settlers. The department has pledged to deny visas to confirmed settler extremists. However, the posture of the rest of the administration remains largely unchanged despite the extraordinary human toll of the war, Netanyahu’s consistent belligerence, and the ways the war is undermining America’s national interests and sapping enthusiasm for Joe Biden in the Democratic base.
When Joe Biden recently characterized the Israeli bombing in Gaza as “indiscriminate,” White House spokespeople immediately walked the comment back. The administration continues to insist that continued military support for Israel remains completely unconditional, regardless of how Israel conducts itself in combat. In addition, the President has repeatedly circumvented Congressional oversight and approval to make sure the weapons can keep flowing even if lawmakers determine they shouldn’t. The administration characterized the charges against Israel in the International Court of Justice as “meritless” before the evidence was even presented — and their veto at the U.N. Security Council will ensure that Israel faces no sanctions regardless of the court’s verdict.
Although divided about what the right course of action might be, the American public is united in overwhelmingly disapproving of Biden’s current approach to the conflict – even as the Israeli public has grown increasingly disaffected with Netanyahu. And for good reason: the dynamics at play are unambiguously bad for the U.S. and Israel alike.
Nonetheless, Israeli officials have declared that the campaign against Hamas will go on for another six months at least. Although the IDF has declared an intent to pull some forces from Gaza in the coming weeks, they plan to shift many of these troops to Israel’s northern border in anticipation of a second conflict in Lebanon.
Netanyahu’s continued tenure in office depends upon the war continuing – an overwhelming majority of Israelis want him to resign after the conflict is over. In order to stay in power, the Israeli prime minister seems committed to extending and expanding the fighting as much as he possibly can. And Joe Biden seems committed to standing unwaveringly by his side. God help us all.
3/6/2024 update: All of the horrors described above have continued and been exacerbated over the intervening two months. Gaza’s health ministry now estimates that over 30,000 have been killed by Israel since October 7. Although most American mainstream media outlets have declined to follow CNN’s example and pursue independent reporting on the conflict, CNN’s Nada Bashir recently provided a powerful segment for Amanpour highlighting the huge numbers of children literally starving to death in Gaza as a result of Israel’s siege and the systematic destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure. It is tough to watch, but critical for American viewers to understand what is happening on the ground in Gaza independent of IDF/ White House spin.
An even more devastating video portrayal is available on Al-Jazeera English:
In response to the growing humanitarian crisis, the Biden Administration has belatedly issued calls for a ceasefire (albeit while still putting the onus on Hamas), and has begun airdropping limited amount of supplies into Gaza to circumvent the ongoing Israeli siege without actually strongarming Netanyahu into changing course.
This is genuinely pathetic “leadership” given the moral demands of the moment, and the deep implication of the United States in the atrocities that have unfolded over the last six months, and that continue to unfold today.