THE LEADING humanitarian law institute, the Geneva Academy of International Law and Human Rights, has released a report that concludes that the death toll from Israel’s genocide in Gaza may exceed 200,000.
The academy based their conclusions on new figures showing a decline in the population of the Gaza Strip of over 10% since the Zionist regime started its genocidal onslaught in October 2023.
Stuart Casey-Maslen, head of the Academy’s project on international humanitarian law, said that such a dramatic drop in the population suggests the loss of around 200,000 people.
He stressed that the official casualty figures fail to capture the full scale of destruction and warned that the situation in Gaza remained ‘extremely serious’ with Palestinian suffering continuing unabated after the US-brokered ‘ceasefire’.
Casey-Maslen said that although there is broad agreement that Israel had killed over 70,000 Palestinians, this figure only took into account bodies recovered and documented by medical teams.
He said that many victims remained buried under rubble beyond the reach of rescuers, meaning that the death toll was far higher than official figures and stressed: ‘We will need to know the exact numbers,’ adding: ‘But it is clear that we are facing massive human loss, and we must understand how these people were killed.’
How 200,000 Palestinians, the majority being women and children, were killed, is not hard to understand.
Supplied by their imperialist backers in the US, UK and Europe with a massive arsenal of bombs, missiles and military equipment, the Zionist regime has since 2023 been waging a war to ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestinians, preparing it for the US to take control of the Strip, realising Trump’s ‘vision’ of turning it into the ‘Riviera of the Middle East’.
That many of the bodies slaughtered by imperialist backed Zionism will never be recovered or documented, was revealed by an investigation by Al Jazeera Arabic news published this week, which revealed that Civil Defence teams in Gaza have documented 2,842 Palestinians who have ‘evaporated’ since Israel launched its genocide in October 2023.
These Palestinians left behind no remains other than blood spray or small fragments of flesh.
The investigation identified US manufactured thermal and thermobaric bombs and missiles, often called vacuum or aerosol bombs capable of generating temperatures exceeding 3,500 degrees Celsius as the cause of evaporating Palestinian men, women and children instantly.
Diana Butta, a lawyer, told Al Jazeera: ‘This is a global genocide, not just an Israeli one.’
She said: ‘We see a continuous flow of these weapons from the United States and Europe. They know these weapons do not distinguish between a fighter and a child, yet they continue to send them.’
Butta emphasised that under international law, the use of weapons that cannot distinguish between combatants and non-combatants constitutes a war crime.
Last month, the Israeli military admitted for the first time that the official number of Palestinians, over 70,000, killed in Gaza was accurate while refusing to acknowledge that the vast number killed were mostly women and children, or that hundreds have starved to death, and that thousands more are buried under rubble.
Since 2023, the Zionist authorities have denied the figures produced by the Gaza Health Ministry, denouncing them as false and insisting that only a handful of civilians had been killed.
With all their previous lies becoming impossible to sustain, the Israeli military clearly believes it’s better to accept the inevitable and hope to distract from the real record of genocidal slaughter carried out with the complicity of the US and its imperialist allies.
The working class internationally, along with the peoples of the world, will not be distracted from the crimes against humanity committed by both the US, its imperialist allies in the UK and Europe and the Israeli Zionist regime.
The time has come for the working class to use its power and take action to put an end to capitalism and a ruling class that treats humanity as garbage and who view genocide as a business opportunity, by calling mass strike action to bring down their genocide-enabling governments, replacing them with workers governments and socialism.
This is the way forward.
