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OPINION:
This column a few days back addressed the attack by Israeli soldiers on Holy Family, the only Roman Catholic parish in the Gaza Strip. The Israelis killed three people and wounded several others. In a response that was offered under duress, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put out the following bland statement: “Israel deeply regrets that stray ammunition hit Gaza’s Holy Family Church. Every innocent life lost is a tragedy.”
It seems like the Israelis may have a problem with stray ammunition across Gaza. Unfortunately, though, quantifying that problem is difficult. The Gaza Ministry of Health, which is controlled by Hamas, estimates that more than 60,000 Palestinians have died in the conflict to date. It is easy to understand why that number is viewed with some suspicion.
It is much, much more difficult to understand why the Israeli government either doesn’t have or doesn’t want to share how many Palestinians may have died since October 2023.
The reticence isn’t likely to be about a lack of data. Way back in January, a study in The Lancet indicated that 64,000 souls had perished in the conflict, and that was six months ago. At that time, our friends at Politico reached out to the Israeli government for comment on the study or the topic more generally. To date, they have received no comment.
Despite the government being unsure about the number of people it may have killed, at least some of its allies are willing to give it the old college try. The Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council gave it a shot in May. First, it noted correctly that Hamas started this conflict by killing 1,200 Israelis. Then it let people know that university researchers have concluded that perhaps as few as one-third of the “casualties” have been women and children. The report appears unclear as to whether that particular rate of killing unarmed people is good or bad.
Finally, the council’s report gets to the heart of the matter. “Taking into account the [Israel Defense Forces’] own estimated death toll data of Hamas combatants, approximately 20,000, Hamas’ own data points to an estimated civilian death toll of approximately 21,700.” It is worth noting that the report references but does not link to the Israel Defense Forces’ estimated death toll. So, it seems that someone in the Israeli government is keeping track of the dead. More importantly, the report’s authors spent a few hundred words knocking down the Ministry of Health’s statistical gymnastics to conclude that the Israelis had killed somewhere north of 20,000 civilians.
That’s a lot of stray ammunition.
Moreover, the idea that Israel treats “every innocent life lost” as a tragedy doesn’t seem to be supported by any of the facts available to us. It would be a good start if the government at least released its own estimate of how many civilians have been killed since October 2023.
George Orwell once correctly noted that “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, and the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus, political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.”
We are at that moment in Gaza.
• Michael McKenna is a contributing editor at The Washington Times.
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