A War on the Civilians of Gaza

The war in Gaza is a war on civilians, and it has been an unusually destructive one.

The Guardian reports on what the war in Gaza has done to Hamas:

Israel’s military estimates it has killed between 1,000 and 2,000 Hamas fighters out of a military force it believes is about 30,000 strong.

There have already been approximately 10,000 women and children killed in Gaza since the war began last month, and many thousands more are still missing. If the military’s estimate of Hamas casualties is correct, that means that at least five and possibly as many as ten women and children have been killed for every militant. Civilian men killed by the bombing campaign would push that number even higher.

Far from inflating the death toll, the official tally from the health ministry is probably low. The Economist reported last week that the “true death toll may already have breached 20,000.” Children make up a huge percentage of the total. According to the same report: “In their latest update Gazan authorities said 5,840 children had been killed, roughly 40% of the total. If the same share of the 7,000 missing are children and have indeed perished, that would bring the total number of children killed to more than 8,000.”

This is obscene, and it confirms how reckless and indiscriminate the military campaign has been. It has been obvious for a while that this is a war on the entire population, but these numbers remove any shred of doubt. The war in Gaza is a war on civilians, and it has been an unusually destructive one.

The New York Times reports on the tremendous speed and scale of the killing of civilians:

While wartime death tolls will never be exact, experts say that even a conservative reading of the casualty figures reported from Gaza shows that the pace of death during Israel’s campaign has few precedents in this century.

People are being killed in Gaza more quickly, they say, than in even the deadliest moments of U.S.-led attacks in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, which were themselves widely criticized by human rights groups.

The current truce needs to be extended beyond the next few days, and that need to be followed by a ceasefire and the lifting of the blockade. Hunger and disease will also be claiming more innocent lives the longer that this disaster is allowed to go on. A halt to the fighting is the best way to secure the release of the remaining hostages and to begin addressing the dire humanitarian conditions in Gaza. Continued slaughter will benefit only fanatics and hardliners.

Many people have noted that the truce could have been arranged weeks ago before so many thousands of civilians had been killed. The last seven weeks of war achieved nothing except to lay waste to large parts of the Gaza Strip and to destroy the homes of hundreds of thousands of people. As Jonathan Katz put it: “In other words, if the primary war aim—as many of Israel’s American defenders want to believe—was to #BringThemHome, then repeated negotiations have succeeded where the war has failed miserably.” Continuing the war when it has proven to be so devastating and ineffective is insane.

A long-term ceasefire is imperative to protect the civilians that have been bearing the brunt of this war. Pressure on the administration and the Israeli government has had some effect, and there needs to be more pressure to bring the war to an end. Failing to end the war now will lead to much greater loss of innocent life.