As if it were a macabre joke or a reminder of the daily occurrence of death in Gaza, the start in Doha of a new round of negotiations between Israel and Hamas to seal a ceasefire after 10 months of war coincided on Thursday with the announcement that the death toll in the Palestinian enclave exceeds 40,000. These are the figures from the Ministry of Health of the Hamas government in the Strip, which the United Nations includes in its reports and usually coincide with the conclusions reached by independent investigators at the end of previous offensives in the enclave.
Gazan health authorities, who rely in part on the testimony of relatives, do not distinguish between militants and civilians in their statistics. According to their figures, almost 70% of the dead are women (around 11,100 have died) and minors (16,500). The case of two of the last children, aged four days, has made headlines around the world because of its dramatic nature. Their father, Mohammed Abu Al-Qumsan, went to the Ministry to register them and, when he returned with the birth certificates, discovered that they had been killed in an Israeli bombing, along with his wife and mother-in-law.
In this macabre statistic, 36 of the children who died died due to lack of food or medicine. Some 17,000 children have been orphaned by one or both parents. Benjamin Netanyahu’s government disputes the figure given by the Gaza health authorities, but also claims that it does not count civilian deaths, only “terrorists” (at least 16,000), according to a very broad definition that does not comply with the norms of international law.
The Israeli newspaper HaaretzThe report compared the figure to other wars, including those in which genocide was committed – which implies proving intent, such as the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Bosniak men in Srebrenica by Bosnian Serb forces. By this comparison, the raw number falls short of far more lethal conflicts, but is proportionally one of the highest in the 21st century, given the short time span (10 months) and Gaza’s population of some 2.3 million.
2% of the population
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The dead are close to 2% of the population and are currently only part of the iceberg: thousands of bodies are estimated to be buried under the rubble and will only be added to the list when they are unearthed at the end of the war.
The figures are also historic for certain groups. Israel prevents access to the international press, while frequently embedding Israeli military correspondents (who oscillate between spreading the official narrative and being enthusiastic about the destruction they see) with the troops, and occasionally foreigners, especially with editorial lines closer to Netanyahu’s policies. The narrative from Gaza is therefore mainly that of Palestinian journalists who lived there before October 7, the day of the massive Hamas attack with some 1,200 dead that triggered the invasion. The ministry estimates that 168 journalists and bloggers have lost their lives. Also 855 members of the medical staff and 79 nurses. 520 bodies have been recovered from mass graves.
The normalisation of the trickle of deaths (dozens a day, at least; more than a hundred, when a massacre like the one last Saturday, in a school where displaced people were taking refuge, occurs), a certain inertia and the dizzying weeks between Joe Biden’s disastrous debate, his replacement by Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate and the attempted assassination of Donald Trump had shifted the focus away from the invasion of Gaza. But, at the end of July, Israel assassinated two important figures in 24 hours: Hezbollah’s number two, Fuad Shukr, in his fiefdom in Beirut; and the political leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniya, in Tehran, where he had been invited to the inauguration of the new Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian. The country has recognised the first death; while the other is attributed to it.
Iran and Hezbollah’s revenge
Iran and Hezbollah have called for “certain” revenge, and the United States has awakened from its lethargy to try to defuse a retaliation that would be followed by a predictably brutal response that threatens to open the door to a regional war just before the US presidential elections on November 5. The concern led the United States, Egypt and Qatar, the countries that have been mediating between Israel and Hamas since December, to call a meeting to negotiate a ceasefire in Gaza that will continue on Friday, according to John Kirby, the White House spokesman for international affairs.
Kirby, who has spoken of a “promising start,” downplays the absence of Hamas, with whom Qatar and Egypt are in communication. “The process in Doha is very much in line with what has been done in the past,” he said. The aim of the meeting is to defuse reprisals and regional tensions by silencing the weapons in Gaza and agreeing on the gradual return to their homes of the 115 Israeli hostages who remain in the Strip.
Hamas issued a statement on Thursday – the release of which, on the very day of the negotiations, suggests that it is part of the psychological war – in which it states that a guard killed an Israeli hostage he was guarding “out of revenge, and against instructions”, after learning that his two sons had died in a bombing. “The incident does not represent our ethics or the instructions of our religion on the treatment of captives,” the Islamist movement adds.
On Monday, when Hamas reported the incident without going into details, the Israeli army said it had no information to confirm or deny it. On Thursday, it said the body shown by Hamas in the photo had already been recovered by troops in November.
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