Staggering Figure Amounts to 8% of Population of Gaza
August 7 marks the ten-month anniversary of the Israeli attack on Gaza.
A study by The Lancet, the prestigious British peer-reviewed medical journal, warns that the death toll could be 186,000 or more, almost five times the “official” figure of just over 38,000 and a staggering figure which amounts to 8% of the population of Gaza.
Josh Paul, who resigned his position in the State Department, compared Israeli army operations to the carpet bombing of Germany during World War II.
A new documentary produced by Al Jazeera is fittingly subtitled “Biden’s War in Gaza.”
It details the Biden administration’s staunch support for Israel and provision of massive amounts of weaponry used to pulverize Gazans.
The U.S. has long supported Israel as a key strategic proxy and junior partner in the Middle East.
Israel houses U.S. military bases, coordinates with U.S. intelligence and does much dirty work for the U.S.—like helping to debilitate U.S. nemesis Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1967 Six-Day War, weakening U.S. regional adversaries like Hezbollah, and trying to destabilize Iran and murdering its nuclear scientists.
![Image of a US military base [DVIDSHUB/Fkickr]](https://i0.wp.com/covertactionmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/image-of-a-us-military-base-dvidshub-fkickr.jpeg?resize=696%2C464&ssl=1)
Since the 1960s, Israel has wanted to build a canal cutting through parts of Gaza (the Ben-Gurion canal—envisioned as an alternative to the Suez canal) that could definitively solve Israel’s water shortage problems and improve trade with the rest of the Middle East.
Israel and the U.S. further support the Israeli takeover of Gaza so they can access offshore oil deposits that were discovered in 1999 and which currently fall under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority as was mandated under the 1995 Oslo accords.[1]
The Gaza coast has natural gas deposits, which the Biden administration has encouraged Israel to develop, though Hamas claims Gazans should have control over.
When a cease-fire declaration was first proposed at the UN Security Council for the Israel-Gaza War, U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, predictably and dutifully, vetoed it.
On at least two occasions, the Biden administration bypassed Congress to deliver extra weapons—as if the weapons Israel already had were not enough.
In late June, the White House bragged that it had provided more than $6.5 billion in weapons since October 7—a figure nearly double the U.S.’s typical annual Israel military aid budget of $3.4 billion, which was further supplemented by $14 billion in weapons funding allocated by Congress this year.
The weapons have included thousands of precision-guided munitions, Hellfire missiles, artillery ammunition, charges for howitzers, tank rounds, shoulder-fired rockets, and small-diameter, bunker-buster, and 2,000-pound bombs.
Speaking to The Washington Post, former Biden administration official Jeremy Konyndyk said that the “extraordinary number of sales over the course of a pretty short amount of time” suggests that Israel would not be able to maintain its operation against Hamas in Gaza “without this level of U.S. support.”
Dr. Agnès Callemard, the Secretary General of Amnesty International, said that U.S. weapons had been used by IDF forces in the obliteration of Palestinian families.
Dave DeCamp reported in Antiwar.com on July 10 that a U.S.-made GBU-39 small-diameter bomb, a 250-pound munition made by Boeing, struck a school in the town of Abassan that was sheltering civilians, killing 31 people including eight children.
The Al Jazeera documentary featured horrific stories of Gazans whose homes were bombed and families were killed.
One woman lost her six-year-old daughter, Hind Rajab, after an IDF tank fired on her car for no apparent purpose. The ambulance sent to rescue Hind and her family was also fired upon.
Many members of the Salem family were killed when the IDF bombed an apartment building in Gaza City, killing more than 100 civilians.
After survivors moved to another building across town, that building was also bombed and attacked by IDF Special Forces officers who, in front of the women and children (the women were stripped naked), beat, tortured and executed the men.
Project Air War reported that the experience of the Salem family was not out of the ordinary; there were many cases where 100+ civilians were killed in Israeli air strikes, many of them carried out with U.S.-made weapons, and many other Gazans were subjected to beatings and torture.
Footage from the documentary shows Israeli soldiers firing on unarmed Gazans desperately trying to get food, and others walking down the street, in blatant war crimes.
A lingering question about the Israeli war on Gaza is whether October 7 was a false-flag attack and the extent to which the Israeli government deliberately allowed it to happen.
A report on ABC News featured IDF female soldiers at a surveillance outpost along the Gaza border who said they reported to their superiors on suspicious activity by Hamas before October 7 but that the reports were ignored.
On October 7, their outpost was overrun and many of the young women who worked there were killed or taken hostage.
Dr. Philip Giraldi, a former CIA official, wrote:
“As a former intelligence officer, I find it impossible to believe that Israel did not have multiple informants inside Gaza as well as electronic listening devices all along the border wall which would have picked up movements of groups and vehicles. In other words, the whole thing might be a tissue of lies as is often the case.”
Efrat Fenigson, a former IDF intelligence official, stated:
“There’s no way Israel did not know of what’s coming. How come border crossings were wide open? Something is VERY WRONG HERE, something is very strange, this chain of events is very unusual and not typical for the Israeli defense system. To me this surprise attack seems like a planned operation. On all fronts.”
According to Israel’s Defense Ministry, the Gazan border fence that Hamas was able to cross on October 7 had hundreds of cameras, radars and other sensors.
The Ministry said the project’s “smart fence” is more than six meters high (approximately 20 feet) and its maritime barrier includes means to detect infiltration by sea and a remote-controlled weapons system, making it impossible to penetrate in the way that it was.
The commander of the Kerem Shalom Battalion, who was intimately familiar with the fence, said that “the obstacle is built so that even a fox cannot pass it….Something here [October 7] doesn’t add up to me!!!”
According to the commander, there are 24/7 on-duty forces responsible for guarding the fence and observations cover every inch of it. They detect movement near the fence and respond to it well before the fence could be breeched.
Michel Chossudovsky, General Herzl Halevi and Dr. Paul Craig Roberts ask in light of all of the above:
“How the hell does a Palestinian tractor move towards the fence without anyone reacting to it?
How did the tractor manage to sabotage the fence for a long hour and open access to Israel without anyone reacting to it?
How did hundreds of terrorists and civilians cross the barrier without anyone on our side lifting a finger?
How did terrorists arrive on foot and in vehicles, armed from head to toe, to dozens of Israeli settlements, without any reaction from our [the Israeli] side?
How did hundreds of terrorists stay in Israeli territory for long hours, shoot hundreds of Israelis, loot property, without there being even a single reaction on our [the Israeli] side?
How did it happen that hundreds of terrorists kidnapped dozens of Israelis, surprised soldiers, officers when they were not ready, and kidnapped them to Gaza, without anyone stopping them?
How is it that one bullet was not fired?
How did all this happen under our noses?”
Israeli authorities of course are unable to answer these questions.
Chossudovsky, who is founder of the website Globalresearch.ca, concludes that October 7 was “a false flag operation carried out by a ‘faction’ (intelligence assets) within Hamas [which Netanyahu bragged about helping to finance], in close liaison with Mossad and U.S. intelligence. The false flag logic—which has resulted in Israeli casualties—has provided Israel with a justification to undertake a genocide against Palestinians.”
This genocide has long been the ambition of Israel’s far right, which refers to the Palestinians in the kind of subhuman terminology that Nazis once applied to Slavs and Jews.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needed a war, furthermore, to retain his power. He wanted to turn the Israeli people’s attention away from growing class inequalities and his own corrupt practices, which may yet land him in jail.
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An American company, Genie Oil was in 2013 given exploration rights in Israeli occupied Golan Heights on Syrian territory. Former Vice President Dick Cheney was part of Genie “strategic advisery board” along with Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch, former U.S. Treasury director Larry Summers, former CIA Director James Woolesey, and Jacob Rothschild of the famous banking dynasty. ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Left on Left.” He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of five books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), and Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023). Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency . He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
Lancet is a very respectable organization. According to another source the actual civilian death toll in Ukraine as a result of Russia’s invasion is much higher than has been reported in the news.
https://www.sgr.org.uk/resources/war-ukraine-assessing-human-and-environmental-costs
The exact statement made by Lancet is as follows.
Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37 396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.