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International Relations Media Palestine & Israel

The Vast Gaza Death Undercount – Undermines Civic, Diplomatic and Political Pressures

By Z ArticleNo Comments4 Mins Read
Source: Ralph Nader Blog
Mourners surround the flag-draped body of two-year-old Laila al-Khatib as it lies in a mosque, a day after she succumbed to her wounds after being shot during an Israeli military raid in Jenin in the occupied West Bank, ahead of her funeral on January 26, 2025. (Photo: Mohammed Nasser / APA Images)

The vast undercount of Israeli-caused deaths in Gaza is regularly reported as 50,000. The actual toll from violent military action and the indirect deaths (stemming from infectious disease, epidemics, untreated chronic illness, untreated serious wounds, and starvation) is well over 400,000 and growing by the day.

No crowded enclave like Gaza – the geographical size of Philadelphia – with 2.3 million people under a long-term siege blocking essentials can withstand over 115 thousand tons of bombs, plus artillery, grenades, and snipers targeting civilians, with uncontrollable fires everywhere. How could 97.5% of its inhabitants survive? Tens of thousands of Palestinian children, women, and men lie under the rubble. Tens of thousands of diabetics and cancer victims have no medicine. Five thousand babies a month are born into the rubble.

As declared by the Israeli war ministries, “no food, water, medicine, electricity and fuel,” the words of genocide or mass murder of utterly defenseless civilians who had nothing to do with October 7, 2023 — hikes the ratio of “indirect deaths” to the higher range of three to fifteen-fold by the Geneva Declaration Secretariat’s review of prior conflicts.

In my lengthy article, published in the Capitol Hill Citizen, (August/September 2024 issue) I noted that the total ban by Netanyahu of foreign and Israeli reporters from entering the killing fields of Gaza allows the undercount by Hamas to be the anchor on the lethal truth. Hamas counts only names of the deceased given by hospitals and mortuaries, which were largely destroyed many months ago. Hamas, like Netanyahu, favors an undercount for obviously different reasons – the former to lessen the ire of its people for not protecting them and the latter to diminish international sanctions and condemnation.

It is not as if there are no higher estimates by credible groups. UN agencies, international aid groups, and specialists in disaster casualties at places like Brown University and the University of Edinburgh, and reports in the prestigious medical journal LANCET all point to a major undercount. They cite minimum reasonable estimates. But the mass media just keeps citing the Hamas undercount, awaiting some magical number that meets an impossible level of precision.

Interestingly, the mass media has no problem reporting estimates of deaths under the Syrian Assad dictatorship, during the Sudanese conflict, or the Russian war on Ukraine. It seems only the Palestinians are not allowed to live by the Israeli/U.S. terrorist regimes and are not told how many of them are being annihilated. Imagine, whole extended families in apartment buildings and tents.

More curious is why the so-called Left, in their denunciations, are still clinging to the Hamas figure. A famous commentator from Haaretz and a civic leader in the U.S. gave me the same answer. The Hamas figures are horrific enough!

Can you imagine Israeli governments undercounting their fatalities by nearly 90%?

More curious is what is keeping the few strong defenders of Palestinian survival in Congress from asking the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress to come up with a minimum accurate figure from the available empirical and clinical evidence?

What kept the majority of Democrats in the Senate under Biden from subpoenaing the evidence accumulated by the State Department on the death/injury count? The State Department has been resisting our Freedom of Information request since May 23, 2024. What about tapping into the work of sixteen Israeli human rights groups, including the military reservist groups like “Breaking the Silence”?

Numbers matter in wars and natural disasters. They matter in the intensity behind the civic, political, and diplomatic efforts worldwide to stop the killing, secure a permanent ceasefire, let in the thousands of trucks bearing humanitarian aid (food, water, medicine, fuel, and other essentials), and enter into serious peace negotiations.

Instead, Trump is backing the expulsion of the Palestinian survivors, supporting the annexation of the West Bank, and leaving devastated Gaza as a real estate opportunity for Israeli and American developers.

This attitude is what Jim Zogby (founder of the Arab-American Institute) exposed when years ago he delivered a lecture on “The Other Anti-Semitism” before an Israeli University audience. The other antisemitism, exhibited by Biden and Trump, is backed by F-16s and other weapons of mass destruction that have killed over 100,000 children along with their mothers, fathers, grandmothers, and grandfathers.

A deep racism backed by a genocidal delivery system day after day is funded by American tax dollars delivered by a homicidal Congress. A Congress that has refused, since 1948, testimony by leading Israeli and Palestinian peace advocates before House and Senate Committees to provide justice for the Palestinian people.

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Nader is opposed to big insurance companies, "corporate welfare," and the "dangerous convergence of corporate and government power." While consumer advocate/environmentalist Ralph Nader has virtually no chance of winning the White House, he has been taken quite seriously on the campaign trail.

Indeed, he poses the greatest threat to Sen. John Kerry. Democrats fear that Nader will be a spoiler, as he was in the 2000 election, when he took more than 97,000 votes in Florida. Bush won Florida by just 537 votes. The win gave Bush the election. Nader, an independent candidate, who also ran in 1992 and 1996, is on the ballot in 33 states, including Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, and New Mexico—tough battleground states. Kerry stands a chance of losing those vital states if Nader siphons away the votes of Democrats. President Bush and Kerry have been in a statistical dead heat in nationwide polls, and votes for Nader could well tip the balance in favor of Bush.

Many Kerry supporters contend that a vote for Nader is in reality a vote for Bush and have made concerted efforts to persuade Nader to throw his support behind the Democratic candidate. Nader, however, has held fast to his convictions that the two candidates are nearly indistinguishable and are pawns of big business.

Designing Cars for Everything but Safety

Nader was born in Winsted, Connecticut, on Feb. 27, 1934 to Lebanese immigrants Nathra and Rose Nader. Nathra ran a bakery and restaurant. As a child, Ralph played with David Halberstam, who\'s now a highly regarded journalist.

Nader with Democratic nominee Jimmy Carter outside of Jimmy Carter\'s home on August 7, 1976, discussing Consumer Protection. (Source/AP)
Nader graduated magna cum laude from Princeton in 1955 and from Harvard Law School in 1958. As a student at Harvard, Nader first researched the design of automobiles. In an article titled "The Safe Car You Can\'t Buy," which appeared in the Nation in 1959, he concluded, "It is clear Detroit today is designing automobiles for style, cost, performance, and calculated obsolescence, but not—despite the 5,000,000 reported accidents, nearly 40,000 fatalities, 110,000 permanent disabilities, and 1,500,000 injuries yearly—for safety."

Early Years as a Consumer Advocate

After a stint working as a lawyer in Hartford, Connecticut, Nader headed for Washington, where he began his career as a consumer advocate. He worked for Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the Department of Labor and volunteered as an adviser to a Senate subcommittee that was studying automobile safety.

In 1965, he published Unsafe at Any Speed, a best-selling indictment of the auto industry and its poor safety standards. He specifically targeted General Motors\' Corvair. Largely because of his influence, Congress passed the 1966 National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act. Nader was also influential in the passage of 1967\'s Wholesome Meat Act, which called for federal inspections of beef and poultry and imposed standards on slaughterhouses, as well as the Clean Air Act and the Freedom of Information Act.

"Nader\'s Raiders" and Modern Consumer Movement

Nader\'s crusade caught on, and swarms of activists, called "Nader\'s Raiders," joined his modern consumer movement. They pressed for protections for workers, taxpayers, and the environment and fought to stem the power of large corporations.

In 1969 Nader established the Center for the Study of Responsive Law, which exposed corporate irresponsibility and the federal government\'s failure to enforce regulation of business. He founded Public Citizen and U.S. Public Interest Research Group in 1971, an umbrella for many other such groups.

A prolific writer, Nader\'s books include Corporate Power in America (1973), Who\'s Poisoning America (1981), and Winning the Insurance Game (1990).

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