“Reading the health experts, I am starting to think with horror that if it’s not stopped, Israel’s assault could end up exterminating almost the entire population in Gaza over the next couple of years,” Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine, wrote on Friday on social media.
Albanese cited a recent report from University of Edinburgh global public health chair Devi Sridhar finding that the true death toll from Israel’s genocide could be estimated at 335,500 as of September.
Sridhar based this rough calculation off of an estimate by public health researchers published in The Lancet in July regarding typical indirect death counts from previous conflicts, citing research hailed as the gold standard in the field. At that time, the researchers estimated that the true death toll could be roughly 186,000, stemming from direct killings like bombings as well as Israel’s destruction of the health, food and sanitation systems in Gaza.
The death toll, then, could be between 15 and 20 percent of the population by the end of this year, Albanese said, in just over a year of Israel’s genocide. And, as Sridhar writes in her Guardian report, the calculation that she borrows from The Lancet editorial is highly conservative — meaning the death toll could be even higher than her 335,500 estimate.
In this case it is absolutely crucial, as one of the repeated arguments made by the genocide supporters is “its just war, they try to prevent civillian deaths” or “if it was genocide they would have killed much more people”
These are lies. They are absolutely deliberate in what they do, and the realistic numbers prove that. The numbers of people officially recognised as dead has been rising only slowly since april/may. This is not because the killing and devastation have become less, they got worse. It is because the health system has collapsed after Israel made a point of destroying it.
Oh yeah, don’t get me wrong, I get why it needs to be said. It’s just sad that it does, you know? That we live in a world where something like this happens, and people are just so numb and apathetic to it.