‘Everyone in Gaza Is Sick, Injured, or Both’ – Israel’s 2.1 million Victims

MEDIA, 30 Sep 2024

Media Lens - TRANSCEND Media Service

Some of at least 40,000 Palestinian victims of Israeli genocide in Gaza.

24 Sep 2024 – On 20 Jul 1982, an IRA bomb exploded beneath a bandstand on which 30 military bandsmen of the 1st Battalion, Royal Green Jackets were performing in Regent’s Park, London. Six of the bandsmen were killed instantly and the rest were injured; a seventh later died of his wounds. Eight civilians were also injured.

Although directed at a military target, the attack was widely denounced by the British press as a murderous act of terrorism.

On 18 September, the BBC reported on thousands of simultaneous bombings in Lebanon widely assumed to be the work of Israel:

‘Lebanon’s health minister says the number of people killed when pagers used by members of the armed group Hezbollah exploded on Tuesday has risen to 12, including two children and four healthcare workers.

‘Firas Abiad told a news conference that almost two-thirds of the 2,800 wounded people needed some form of surgery to their face, eyes or hands, and that many had suffered amputations.’

The pager attack was followed the next day by another wave of attacks detonating bombs in walkie-talkies. A total of 39 people were killed in both attacks. Israel has since launched numerous air strikes killing around 492 people, including 35 children, and Hezbollah has responded with rocket attacks. In July, the BBC reported on earlier cross-border attacks:

‘Data gathered by the US-based Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (Acled) and analysed by the BBC suggest both sides together carried out a combined 7,491 cross-border attacks between 8 October 2023 and 5 July 2024. These figures indicated that Israel has carried out around five times as many as Hezbollah.’

The UN said the cross-border attacks had forced more than 90,000 people in Lebanon from their homes, with around 100 civilians and 366 Hezbollah fighters killed in Israeli strikes. In Israel, officials said 60,000 civilians had been forced to abandon their homes and 33 people had been killed, including 10 civilians, because of attacks by Hezbollah.

Responding to the pager attacks, Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s veteran International Editor, commented under this headline:

‘Tactical triumph for Israel, but Hezbollah won’t be deterred’

Bowen wrote:

‘Attacking Hezbollah’s communications network has delivered a tactical victory to Israel – the sort of spectacular coup you would read about in a thriller.’

Imagine the reaction if, in 1982, a high-profile BBC journalist had written:

‘Attacking the Royal Green Jackets’ military bandsmen has delivered a tactical victory to the IRA – the sort of spectacular coup you would read about in a thriller.’

We suspect that if the Israeli-Hezbollah roles had been reversed, Bowen might have used, or quoted, the word ‘terrorism’ in his report. After all, if remotely detonating thousands of bombs widely scattered around civilian society – such that numerous children, health workers and other civilians were killed and injured – is not terrorism, what is? Hezbollah personnel were targeted, but of course nobody knew exactly where the thousands of bombs would be when they exploded.

Ramzi Kaiss of Human Rights Watch told Democracy Now! that the attacks struck ‘military targets and civilians alike without distinguishing between them – this is an unlawfully indiscriminate attack, and it is unlawful under the laws of war, and there needs to be accountability’.

Former CIA Director Leon Panetta said on CBS of the pager attacks:

‘I don’t think there’s any question it’s a form of terrorism.’

Bowen added:

‘Once again though, there are serious question marks about the way an Israeli attack has wounded and killed civilian bystanders.’

Are there ‘serious question marks’ – in the sense, that some people have questioned the morality and legality – about the US massacre in March 1968 that murdered 504 old men, women and children in the Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai? Are there ‘serious question marks’ about the legality and morality of the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States? Of course not, the idea is absurd; in fact, obscene. There is nothing to question – these were clearly massive crimes against humanity.

So, why, for the BBC, do ‘serious question marks’ hang over the legality and morality of Israel’s genocidal attacks since 7 October?

Bowen has a long history of downplaying the true horror of the crimes committed by his government and its allies. In 2006, three years into the illegal, full-scale invasion and occupation of Iraq, he suggested that the invasion had triggered moves towards democratisation elsewhere in the region. Nevertheless, he cautioned:

‘All this does not mean that the dreams that the Bush administration has for the region are coming true.’

Here, Bowen was openly claiming that the United States, Britain and their oil-hungry corporations were driven by ‘dreams’ of democratisation in Iraq and elsewhere in the region. This, in fact, was an exact reversal of the truth – there was no question of local populations controlling their own natural resources. That was the whole point of the war.

The impact of this kind of subliminal, Pollyanna whitewashing makes it difficult for the public to feel the truth of what is happening in Gaza. The problem is that the ‘mainstream’ is not always so unmoved by great criminality; and the public, of course, notes the difference.

Consider that on 27 May 2012, the massacre of 108 people, including 49 children, two days earlier, in Houla, Syria, dominated the Independent on Sunday’s front cover. The banner headline roared:

‘SYRIA: THE WORLD LOOKS THE OTHER WAY. WILL YOU?’

Clearly, this was an extremely emotive, personal appeal to readers. The text beneath read:

‘There is, of course, supposed to be a ceasefire, which the brutal Assad regime simply ignores. And the international community? It just averts its gaze. Will you do the same? Or will the sickening fate of these innocent children make you very, very angry?’

The Independent on Sunday was not just reporting a crime to readers; it was making us responsible for doing something about it. In fact, there was considerable doubt about who perpetrated the massacre. See here and here.

In the Independent, at the end of his tether, an emotional David Aaronovitch wrote in 1999 of Nato’s assault on Serbia:

‘I could weep for these poor academics [who oppose the war], if the plight of the Kosovars weren’t already occupying all available tear-ducts.’ (Aaronovitch, ‘The reality is that war, tragedy and incompetence go together,’ The Independent, May 11, 1999)

Later, in similar vein, Aaronovitch declared that Saddam Hussein had to go:

‘I want him out, for the sake of the region (and therefore, eventually, for our sakes), but most particularly for the sake of the Iraqi people who cannot lift this yoke on their own.’ (Aaronovitch, ‘Why the Left must tackle the crimes of Saddam: With or without a second UN resolution, I will not oppose action against Iraq,’ The Observer, 2 February 2003)

In the Guardian, Jonathan Freedland wrote in 1999:

‘How did the British left get so lost? How have its leading lights ended up as the voices of isolationism? How did it come to this…? Why is it the hard left – rather than the isolationist right – who have become the champions of moral indifference? For, make no mistake, that’s what opposition to Nato’s attempt to Clobba Slobba (as the Sun puts it) amounts to… either the West could try to halt the greatest campaign of barbarism in Europe since 1945 – or it could do nothing.’ (Freedland, ‘The left needs to wake up to the real world. This war is a just one’, Guardian, 26 March 1999)

It is difficult to overstate the importance of these incendiary appeals for war, and more to the point, the impact on our psyches when these appeals for urgent ‘action’ are almost completely absent, as is the case now on Gaza. No newspaper editor would dream of calling for a ‘no-fly zone’ over Gaza.

We are trained to recognise a major crisis by the level of alarm sounded by corporate media. As with the evolving climate change catastrophe, it is all too easy for the lack of media alarm to persuade us that things are ‘not that bad’. Perhaps the climate isn’t really collapsing, or the problem is under new management. Perhaps the suffering in Gaza isn’t actually that bad. Otherwise, we would surely have heard more outrage from the ‘humanitarian interventionists’. Assuming we live in a basically sane society that is not drowning in moral and intellectual corruption.

Fortunately, credible eye-witness testimony can help counter this insidious propaganda effect. If we can find a way to access it.

Israel Has Devastated an Entire Society of 2.1 Million People

In a letter to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, shamefully ignored by virtually all ‘mainstream’ media outlets, 30 qualified, UK-based doctors, surgeons, nurses and medical professionals – volunteers in Gaza since 7 October 2023 – described the full extent of the catastrophe. As the authors note, their testimony is significant:

‘We are among the only neutral observers who have been permitted to enter the Gaza Strip since 7 October. With international journalists being targeted and denied access to Gaza, our eyewitness experiences have had to serve in place of journalistic or investigatory accounts.’

In other words, this is a rare example of highly credible, independent, expert testimony on events in Gaza:

‘Many of us also have long standing experience working with British charities in Gaza and across the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt). We have seen the deliberate targeting of civilians on a mass scale, and a total lack of resources, due to the destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system and deliberate restriction of aid. The deleterious effects of Israeli occupation on the Palestinian healthcare system are something many of us have seen before– but never to this extent.’

The authors of the letter note that The Ministry of Health figure of approximately 40,000 Palestinians killed refers only to the number of identified bodies:

‘… but while working in Gaza we bore witness to untold numbers of unidentified bodies, many of them truly unidentifiable due to the extent of damage caused. A correspondence piece in The Lancet, one of Britain’s leading medical journals, estimated that the true figure could be 186,000, reflecting the scale of indirect and unrecorded deaths that have inevitably occurred due to the destruction of the healthcare system’.

The truly awesome scale of Israel’s crime becomes clear when we read the next paragraph, which is of course referring to the plight of fully 2.1 million people, the vast majority of them civilians:

‘With only marginal exceptions, everyone in Gaza is sick, injured, or both. This includes every national aid worker, every international volunteer, and every man, woman, and child. While working in Gaza we saw widespread malnutrition in our patients and our Palestinian healthcare colleagues. Many of us lost weight rapidly in Gaza despite having privileged access to food and having taken our own supplementary nutrient-dense food with us. We have photographic evidence of life-threatening malnutrition in our patients, from babies to the elderly, that we are willing or have already shared with you.

‘Virtually every child under the age of five whom we encountered, both inside and outside of the hospital, had both a cough and watery diarrhoea. Jaundice and hepatitis A infection were widespread in the hospitals in which we worked, while the surgical complication rate was near 100%. Surgical incisions were almost certain to become infected, due to the hospitals’ impossible operating conditions- including a lack of supplies, water, and medications including antibiotics- overcrowding, and due to patients’ malnutrition. We were forced to use household supplies including vinegar for antiseptic purposes, or went without.’

The letter continues:

‘We urge you to realise that epidemics are raging in Gaza. In addition to that, Israel has not stopped bombarding civilians in their tents or displacing the malnourished and sick population of Gaza, approximately half of whom are children, to areas with no running water or even toilets available. This is a horrifying reality. It is virtually guaranteed to result in widespread death from viral and bacterial diarrheal diseases and pneumonias, particularly in children under the age of five.

‘All of us treated children who seemed to have been deliberately targeted by military violence. Bullet wounds to children’s heads and torsos and amputations of limbs and eyes of children were commonplace.’ (Our emphasis)

The letter follows a similar letter sent in July by 45 US physicians and nurses. Dr. Adam Hamawy, a US plastic surgeon and former US Army combat trauma surgeon, commented:

‘We all saw a complete devastation of a society, of people’s lives, of health care structure.’

Dr. Hamawy said his earlier experiences in conflict zones in Sarajevo and Iraq were not comparable to what he had witnessed in Gaza, adding that 90% of those he had seen killed there were women and children.

Dr. Mark Perlmutter, a Jewish American orthopaedic hand surgeon from North Carolina and president of the World Surgical Association, told CNN about two patients aged around six years old, who had suffered gunshots to their heads and chests:

‘“No kid gets shot twice by a sniper by mistake,” Perlmutter said, adding that the shots were “dead center” to their chests.’

Beyond the barely conceivable human carnage, a detailed Bloomberg report noted that more than 70% of Gaza’s housing has been damaged, along with schools, hospitals and businesses:

‘So far, Israeli air strikes have left more than 42 million tonnes of debris across the Strip, according to the UN. That’s enough rubble to fill a line of dump trucks stretching from New York to Singapore.’

Mark Jarzombek, an architectural history professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has studied post World War II reconstruction, commented:

‘What we see in Gaza is something that we have never seen before in the history of urbanism. It’s not just the destruction of physical infrastructure, it’s the destruction of basic institutions of governance and of a sense of normality.’

Do ‘serious question marks’ hang, then, over the morality and legality of Israeli attacks over the last year? Hopefully, we can all agree that Bowen’s formulation was an outrageous misreporting of the truth.

There is, of course, a silver lining to this cloud: the world’s largest aerospace and defence companies are set to rake in record levels of cash over the next three years ‘as they benefit from a surge in government orders for new weapons amid rising geopolitical tensions’.

The leading 15 defence contractors are forecast to log free cash flow of $52bn in 2026, according to analysis by Vertical Research Partners for the Financial Times — almost double their combined cash flow at the end of 2021. The cause is no secret:

‘In the US, recent aid bills for Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel allocated nearly $13bn for weapons production at America’s five biggest defence groups — Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman, Boeing and General Dynamics — and their suppliers. In the UK, the Ministry of Defence has committed £7.6bn for military aid to Ukraine over the past three years, including for stockpile replenishment.

‘The government spending surge has already propelled order books to near record highs.’

The Labour government’s decision to withdraw winter fuel payments from 10 million pensioners, saving £1.3 billion in 2024-2025, is said to be in response to the previous government’s £22 billion ‘black hole’ in the nation’s finances. Happily, there is still £7.6 billon available for the US proxy war against Russia.

Former New York Times journalist Chris Hedges explains:

‘Governance exists. But it is not seen. It is certainly not democratic. It is done by the armies of lobbyists and corporate executives, from the fossil fuel industry, the arms industry, the pharmaceutical industry and Wall Street. Governance happens in secret.’

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Media Lens is a UK-based media watchdog group headed by David Edwards and David Cromwell. In 2007, Media Lens was awarded the Gandhi Foundation International Peace Prize. We have written three co-authored books: Guardians of Power-The Myth of the Liberal Media (Pluto Press, 2006), Newspeak-In the 21st Century (Pluto Press, 2009), and Propaganda Blitz (Pluto Press, 2018). Contacts: David Edwards: editor@medialens.org – David Cromwell: editor@medialens.org

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