The horrors in Gaza continue even if the press has only so much bandwidth for Israel’s continuing genocide. The focus so far has been on the consequences of Israel’s military campaign against civilians (and lack of success in eliminating Hamas), in particular the systematic destruction of hospitals.
But that death pattern is linear, in the sense that it is the result of Israel shellings and snipings. The urgency of recent reports from Gaza about conditions on the ground, and in particular, the effect of food shortages, filthy water, limited shelter, and disease spread seems to be reaching the point where their death count will exceed that of the Israeli armed campaign. And Israel will no doubt try to depict these deaths as an unfortunate consequence beyond their control.
The BMJ among many others has already, forcefully, staked out an opposing view. The prestigious journal ran an editorial at the start of January decrying the Israel campaign in Gaza as necrocide as a follow-on to an earlier piece decrying Israel’s conduct. Key sections:
The horrific scale of Israel’s latest attacks validates the concerns and calls raised in our editorial: namely that Israel’s ongoing military violence in Gaza is an extension of the long- standing, systemic violence intrinsic to the Israeli state’s colonisation and occupation of Palestine. Connections can be clearly traced between the exploitation and dispossession of people, land and resources that defined Euro- pean colonial violence, ongoing neocolonial exploitation worldwide, and every aspect of Israel’s settler colonial violence in Palestine today.6 We reaffirm our unwavering commit- ment to actions that expose and challenge sites of exploitative and extractive power and violence. People’s health, lives and freedoms are at risk…
Attempts to dehistoricise and decon- textualise the present encourage us to ignore the many ways in which the Israeli state dictates both life and death for the Palestinian people, either through the fast violence of aerial bombardments, or what Berlant referred to as ‘slow death’13: visible in the progressive dispossession of Palestinians who are crammed into ever-shrinking spaces, the denial of life-sustaining necessities and services, the destruction of livelihoods, repeated physical assaults and disablement, mass incarceration, extensive restrictions on movement (including to seek healthcare), and now ethnic cleansing in Gaza executed by mustering Palestin- ians through a dystopian grid of ever-shifting, supposedly ‘safe zones…
The recognition of the systematic nature of this violence, and the pervasiveness of Israeli state
control over almost every aspect of the everyday lives of Palestinians, made the philosopher Achille Mbembé declare that: ‘The most accomplished form of necropower is the contemporary colonial occupation of Palestine’.It is the power to dictate the terms of life and death, and ultimately who lives and who dies. Repeatedly framing Palestinian violence as a provocation and Israeli violence as a response is a product of ignorance to the necropower exercised by the Israeli state. Necropower and necropolitics are enabled in places that Achille Mbembé termed ‘death-worlds’, where ‘vast populations are subjected to conditions of life’ that enable a precarious form of survival in perpetual proximity to death. Within this world, there is gross indifference to Palestinian suffering and extreme obfuscation of the horrors of Israeli necropolitics.
While the particulars will be familiar to anyone who has followed the genocide in Gaza, and in particular, the compelling oral presentation by South Africa at the ICJ, the proper use of words is important, Necropower is an important addition to the lexicon.
The UN gave a grim and urgent update on the deteriorating conditions in Gaza to the Security Council (hat tip BC).1 From its site yesterday (emphasis original):
Internally displaced Palestinians are facing acute shortages of food, water, shelter and medicine, while communicable diseases are rising sharply unsanitary conditions and there is a “near total breakdown” in law and order…
Also briefing the Council was Christopher Lockyear, Secretary General, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), or Doctors Without Borders
Fearful of further deadly Israeli attacks, he said he was “appalled” by the United States’ repeated use of its veto power to obstruct efforts to adopt the most evident of resolutions: one demanding an immediate ceasefire…
Calling Washington’s new proposed draft resolution “misleading at best”, he said the Council should reject any resolution “that further hampers humanitarian efforts on the ground and leads this Council to tacitly endorse the continued violence and mass atrocities in Gaza”.
“Attacks on healthcare is an attack against humanity,” he said, noting that while Israel claims Hamas is operating in hospitals, “we have seen no independently verified evidence of this.”
I hate to be grim, but one sign starvation is becoming widespread is when pets are being killed for food. This is hardly uncommon, witness the ship’s cat and sled dogs being sacrificed by the crew of the Endurance and only one cat surviving the siege of Leningrad, a city with just under million people before the German siege. We ran this tweet earlier but as a reminder:
This is Maxim the cat. He was born in 1937 into the Vologdin family in Leningrad. He lived through and survived the blockade with the family.
The Vologdins locked him in a room and did not let him out into the street in order to protect him from being eaten by hungry… pic.twitter.com/uqf3977CkV
— Mats Nilsson (@mazzenilsson) January 27, 2024
An estimated 630,000 died of starvation out of total mortality of 1.5 million. This was a fiercely fought conflict, and so the ratio of casualties to starvation and disease deaths is likely to become even higher if the siege of Gaza continues.
We have not seen anyone attempt to project a trajectory of deaths due to famine and disease. But as a basis for investigation, Johns Hopkins and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine have modeled what the prospects for Gaza over the next six months are, factoring in disease but not starvation. If you look at the table on page 10 in the report,2 you will see the fatalities they estimate are traumatic injury, infectious diseases – endemic, infectious diseases – epidemic, maternal and neonatal health, and non-communicable diseases.
The findings are grim:
Over the next six months we project that, in the absence of epidemics, 6,550 excess deaths would occur under the ceasefire scenario, climbing to 58,260 under the status quo scenario and 74,290 under the escalation scenario. Over the same period and with the occurrence of epidemics, our projections rise to 11,580, 66,720, and 85,750, respectively.
Note that these are mean estimates. Within the 95th percentile confidence range, the ceasefire death count range is 4,200 to 80,370, the status quo range is 48,210 to 193,180 and the epidemic range is 62,350 to 259,680.
Since they are interrelated (starvation and malnutrition increase the odds of dying from contagion as well as from injuries), this would seem to be a major lapse. Perhaps assuming levels of malnutrition and starvation would have made model outcomes seem arbitrary. Or perhaps due to lack of good foundational information (sufficiently in depth reports out of conflict zones), the investigators felt they lacked an adequate basis for including that key variable explicitly, although if you read the text, the researchers do present their findings as including the impact of malnutrition on infectious diseases, leading to a high mortality rate.
As to the infectious diseases included in the estimates above:
Excess deaths from infectious diseases under all scenarios are a particular concern. The breakdown of water and sanitation measures combined with overcrowding in inadequate shelters and insufficient food intake causing acute malnutrition combines into a projected high risk of excess deaths from a variety of infectious diseases. Endemic diseases, particularly COVID-19, influenza and pneumococcal disease, are projected to be the leading causes of infectious disease deaths, similar to the pre-war period. Overall, we project between 1,520 and 2,720 excess deaths due to common endemic infections depending on the scenario, though with wide uncertainty intervals. If epidemics also occur, those that are projected to cause the most excess deaths are cholera (3,595-8,971), polio (both wild-type and vaccine-derived; 1,1145-2,444), measles (260-793), and meningococcal meningitis (24-143); however, the estimates bear high levels of uncertainty inherent in projecting epidemics.
Mind you, this is on top of the current death toll, estimated by Palestinian authorities at 29,410. That is sure to be an undercount, since it does not include bodies still buried in rubble.
Further indications of how desperate conditions in Gaza are now:
Doctors Without Borders says children as young as 5 in Gaza have told them they want to die pic.twitter.com/DvahWdC50v
— Dave DeCamp (@DecampDave) February 22, 2024
At the UN Doctors without Borders recounted some of the horrors in Gaza, including surgeons having to carry out amputations without anaesthesia on children, and they made clear they hold the USA complicit. pic.twitter.com/mgFvOx9h12
— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) February 23, 2024
And the US is determined to keep the savagery going:
The US used its veto power to block a 4th UN Security Council resolution that called for a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza.
The Biden admin keeps sending weapons to Israel, helping it violate an ICJ ruling that says Israel must stop killing Palestinians.https://t.co/fii9fXR4T9
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) February 23, 2024
Don’t buy the pretense that we can’t stop it:
Nancy Pelosi crumbles when asked: “But there are levers that Biden hasn’t used. There are levers that previous presidents have used when Israel has, in their view, crossed a line”
Pelosi: “For example?”
“Eisenhower threatened sanctions..Reagan held up delivery of fighter… pic.twitter.com/Dh6LC5a7GE
— HalalFlow (@halalflow) February 22, 2024
You can see Pelosi wanting to try “That was then” to deflect the historical examples, when she could be cornered by the fact that the only difference between then and now was the level of Israel lobby spending.
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1 The UN appears to be trying to open up another front against Israel, not that that wil make much difference in practice. From Law Society Gazette Ireland (hat tip BC):
The Attorney General (AG) Rossa Fanning SC has told the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that Ireland believes that Israel has committed “serious breaches” of international law by its activities in the West Bank and East Jerusalem…
The AG was representing Ireland at hearings in The Hague arising from a request from the United Nations General Assembly for an advisory opinion from the court on the legal consequences arising from Israel’s action in the Palestinian territory it has occupied since 1967…
The AG said that Israel’s “continuous” settlement activity in the occupied territories “clearly demonstrate that Israel has been engaged in a process of annexation”.
He said that the construction of permanent settlements had “fundamentally altered” the demographics of the area, while Israel had also extended the application of domestic law to those living in settlements.
The AG argued that, by transferring parts of its own civilian population into the occupied territories, Israel had violated article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention…
The AG referred to the rules laid down by international law on military occupation, which was necessarily temporary, did not confer sovereignty, and could not be of indefinite duration.
“Prolonged occupation over an extended period of time raises unavoidable legal questions – in particular whether it constitutes a disguised form of annexation, and/or a determined effort to deny the people of an occupied territory the exercise of their right to self-determination,” he told the court.
“Neither the duration of the occupation nor the scale and extent of settlement activity is, in Ireland’s view, justified or permitted by the law regulating the use of force in self-defence,” the AG continued.
2 We would have embedded the document, but recent conventions in reports have led to them consistently being far too large to embed in WordPress.