Don't Avert Your Eyes: Gaza Has Suffered the Equivalent of 1,200 September 11th Attacks
US Media Refuses to Report the True Scale of the Devastating Destruction
The unprecedented scale of destruction Israel has caused in Gaza – an estimated 30,000 civilians are now dead – is the equivalent of more than 1,200 September 11th attacks in the US adjusted for population. The calculation compares the percentage of the population killed by the Israeli military in Gaza since October 7 with the percentage of the US population killed in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. (See the graphic below for more detail on how I got to this number.)
The comparison between the death rate in Gaza and the death caused by the 9-11 attacks is startling and revealing.
We cannot let the shocking level of destruction in Gaza become normalized just because much of the media ignores the historic magnitude of what we can see with our own eyes. The fact one of my interns figured this out by scratching some numbers on the back of a napkin, while the major media ignores it, is another sign of how much of the information we consume obscures obvious war crimes. It’s not that the mainstream media outlets do not report civilian casualties in Gaza; it’s that they don’t contextualize it nor do they connect it to overwhelming evidence that Israel’s true strategy is to use Hamas as a pretext to completely destroy civilian life in the territory.
This rudimentary calculation shows how easy it was to figure this out:
The NYT and other major outlets in the US also use tricked-up phraseology to subtly shift culpability away from Israel for the level of destruction. A common trick, insisted on by the Israeli government press office, is that the highly credible death toll put out by the Gaza Ministry of Health “does not distinguish between civilian and military casualties” – somehow suggesting that most of the dead might have been killed in some sort of fighting, when the reality is that 70% of the dead are children and women. It’s a way to take the edge off the atrocity. Another trick: have you ever noticed how in much reporting Palestinians usually are the ones who “die” while Israelis are the ones “killed”?
The actual context is this: short of what the US did with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, what Israel is doing to Gaza is without question the most sustained mass killing of civilians in armed conflict in recent history. According to data from last week, the dead now include roughly 13,000 children and 8,500 women. That's six times as many children killed as those in the Russia-Ukraine war which is entering its third year. Oxfam reported in January that Israel was killing roughly 250 civilians per day in Gaza.
The picture above has haunted me for months. It shows the aftermath of Israel's dropping of a 2,000-pound "bunker busting" bomb on the densely populated Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza City way back on October 31, a little more than three weeks after the conflict began. Dozens of civilians died that day; no evidence was produced that even a single Hamas commander or Hamas combatant was killed. You would be hard-pressed to find this picture in a US newspaper. The few pictures I’ve seen of the aftermath of the bombing have been cropped so the dead bodies are not there.
At the time of the bombing of the refugee camp, Israel already had dropped 11,000 bombs on Gaza in less than four weeks. The country’s military at that time had created the rough equivalent of 400 September 11 events adjusted for Gaza's population of 2.3 million. Four months later, it is now over three times as high. And when aid groups accuse Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war – the United Nations estimates 400,000 people in Gaza face an immediate risk of starving to death while Israel continues to block the entry of sufficient humanitarian aid – we are likely to end up with 100,000 civilians dead at a minimum by the end of this year if the current situation continues and there is no ceasefire.
This staggering death toll is not the inevitable byproduct of war, but rather part of the Netanyahu government’s deliberate strategy to use the pretext of “dismantling” Hamas to inflict indiscriminate suffering on the entire Palestinian civilian population. The goal is to make conditions of life in Gaza so horrific that civilians will all but beg to resettle in other countries where they might have access to food and humanitarian assistance. Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham reported last October 30 in +972 Magazine that Israel’s Intelligence Ministry actually wrote a plan to use the so-called war against Hamas to force Palestinians in Gaza to cram in to the southernmost part of the strip, with the ultimate goal of forcing them into Egypt. As far as I can tell, the information in this groundbreaking article was never reported in the mainstream US media.
One other point: what is happening in Gaza is not a "war" despite the media's and Israel's claims. Gaza is not a country. It has no army, no Air Force, no embassy, no representation in the UN, and obviously no sovereignty. This is largely a one-sided attack against a civilian population. To Netanyahu, defeating Hamas is subordinate to the main show of trying to expel Palestinians from Gaza. It is telling that Israel's military has yet to identify even a single high-level Hamas military or political leader in Gaza actually killed after months of incessant bombing and demolition of civilian infrastructure.
I keep asking myself: What stops this?
-Steven