Ralph Nader
CounterPunch / July 15, 2024
In the early weeks of Israel’s massive bombardment and invasion of Gaza, the Israeli military was killing anyone who moved and destroying anything that stood. In response to telephone calls from President Joe Biden and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken urging Netanyahu to minimize civilian casualties reportedly he would respond: Don’t lecture me, look at what you did to Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Dresden.
The combined official death toll from these two atomic bombs and the firebombing of Dresden was around 239 thousand civilians. After nine months of the Israeli government’s relentless day and night genocide war machine, bristling with the latest U.S. weaponry, Israel has killed far more than that number of Gaza civilians. In a tiny enclave with 2.3 million people (compared to the total population of Japan and Germany in World War II of 152 million), at least 300,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have been killed with more dying every day. Daily annihilations by F-16s, tanks, and arbitrary executions, combined with Israeli bans on food, water, medicine, electricity, and fuel have generated starvation, diseases, untreated injuries, homelessness for almost all Gazans. The destruction of Gaza’s hospitals and healthcare facilities adds to the military-caused casualty toll.
Forty-five thousand babies have been born into the rubble since October. Infants are plagued by contaminated water, poor nutrition, and a dire shortage of healthcare. Their mothers are starving. What about the plight of a similar number of one- or two-year-olds? What about fifty thousand serious diabetics without insulin? An even larger number of cancer patients are denied their medicine and care.
Hundreds of healthcare workers were killed with the hungry, exhausted, sick, and injured survivors staggering bravely to those broken down hospitals that haven’t been entirely demolished.
It isn’t as if major global health and food program organizations have not been sounding the alarms of famine, epidemics and military violence under the unfolding eradication of Gaza’s trapped defenseless inhabitants. Organizations such as UNICEF, the Global Food Program, Oxfam, the UN Humanitarian Agency, The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), USAID and Biden’s own Humanitarian adviser, David Satterfield, know the looming numbers that spell omnicide for the families of Gaza.
Back in December, Devi Sridhar, the chair of global health at the University of Edinburgh estimated half a million Gazans will likely die in 2024 if conditions causing tens of thousands of deaths in the last three months of 2023 continue. Conditions have gotten worse as the causes of mortality have grown and intensified week by week.
In an admittedly conservative estimate, three researchers published in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet, that, as of mid-June, “it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.”
Why then does the media stick to the official Hamas Health Ministry’s huge undercount now at about 39,000 deaths? First, early on, the Ministry took its figures from names of the deceased provided by hospitals and morgues which are now devastated and inoperative. The Hamas regime doesn’t mind this undercount since it lessens the criticism that it cannot protect its own people and shelter them from what they knew was coming after October 7th from the most racist, genocidal, and expansionist Israeli regime ever.
Netanyahu – who has boasted over the years to his Likud Party, that he has backed and helped fund Hamas due to its opposition to a two-state solution – likes the vast undercount of his mass slaughter.
But there are other reasons for this adoption of the low Hamas figures. For Biden, it keeps down the intensity of domestic protests demanding decisive White House pressure on Netanyahu for a permanent ceasefire, the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, and an end to the blockade to allow in the thousands of trucks carrying humanitarian aid paid for by the U.S.
Netanyahu’s long-time prohibition of all Israeli and foreign war correspondents from entering Gaza as independent reporters has concealed from the world much of the carnage in these killing fields. Finally, finally, on July 11, 2024, more than 70 media and civil society organizations, including the New York Times, The Washington Post, AP, CNN and the BBC signed an open letter demanding that Israel “give journalists independent access to Gaza.”
Palestinian journalists in Gaza are being hunted down by Netanyahu, who allows killing scores of reporters and their families. The survivors are bravely trying to report on the devastation for outsiders and social media. Nonetheless, the mainstream press, to do its job, has to have reporters on the ground.
Netanyahu is a master at biding his time and stalling to keep his job. Despised by three out of four Israelis for both his domestic tyrannies and for collapsing his multi-tiered border defense on October 7, he is also under indictment for political corruption by Israeli prosecutors. Israeli street protests are getting larger by the week and the majority of Israelis want new elections now!
The reckoning over what Netanyahu’s savage terror state has done to innocent Palestinians from infants in incubators to the elderly in wheelchairs is coming to Israeli society. As the soldiers return, some will be narrating the horrors they saw and were ordered to produce. Already six reservists have told an Israeli magazine that they were encouraged to shoot and kill any Palestinian they saw on the street or in their homes. There are no operating rules of engagement as required by international law. They gave examples of the target practice, as they told the reporter they would no longer serve in Gaza.
Such soldiers are called “refuseniks,” who became a courageously articulate, if harassed, protest group about twenty years ago. (See Israeli Refuseniks Forsake Army Despite Post-October 7 Nationalist Frenzy, The Intercept January 2, 2024)
As more information flows through the weakening Israeli censorship system, the many Israeli human rights associations will be strengthened (See December 13, 2023, an open letter titled, “Stop the Humanitarian Catastrophe” to President Biden by 16 Israeli human rights groups which appeared in The New York Times). The exaggeration of the Hamas threat to Israel, following a one-time homicide-suicide mission through a mysteriously open border into Israel on October 7, 2023 will become evident. Hamas had a militia of some 20,000 fighters with small arms and dwindling ammunition, hiding in tunnels against a military, nuclear-armed superpower with over 400,000 army soldiers, hundreds of tanks and 1500 F-16 pilots.
Joe Biden has just authorized another arsenal of 500 lb. bombs for Netanyahu to use against the remnants of Gazan civilian life. He touts his refusal to send Israel any more 2000 lb. bombs capable of destroying entire neighborhoods.
Meanwhile, deep in the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies, analysts are creating scenarios of what forthcoming retaliation against our country could look like. With cheap, advanced armed drones increasingly producible by more makers anywhere, these scenarios are not the stuff of science fiction.
By kicking the two-state solution down the road for decades, favoring Israel, with supine Congressional backing, our presidents have assured that our own national security, not to mention our tradition of free speech in the U.S., is increasingly vulnerable.
Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer and author of Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!
