Workers of death. Cartoon of 07/07/2024 in CTXT
Israel approved the construction of 5295 housing units in settlements in the occupied West Bank.
This is the highest number of new housing units authorised, illegal under international law, in settlements in the occupied West Bank for more than three decades.
A large-scale land theft that has not ceased for years and continues to reveal the sole intentions of the occupiers, state terrorism, systematic extermination and occupation, with its variants on overkill as they bomb refugee camps, civilian facilities of any kind, including hospitals and schools.
According to UNICEF, which continues to call for an end to all hostilities and a durable ceasefire, 90 per cent of Gaza's population has been displaced since October 2023. Many of them are children. The places to which people are being forced to move lack basic necessities and security.
Massacres and continuous human rights violations that are easy to lose track of and no longer seem to shock the media because they have become routine. Something like a naturalised counter of "necessary" killings. They prefer to call it "war" so that it seems normal to us. And no, it is not a war. It is a live genocide.
This is the worst thing that can happen to genocide, that it becomes normalised and that the gushing of mass murder is no more than a footnote with a number as if it were a sports score. Some news agencies, such as EFE, the Spanish public news agency, continue to call those killed "dead". And so time goes by and the figures of genocide continue to swell.
And while we are on the subject of numbers, if until now Euro-Med Monitor gave death figures slightly above the "official" ones, earlier this month The Lancet published an article in which it "conservatively" estimated that the number of dead in the Gaza genocide could be 186,000 people or more. This is about 8 per cent of the population.
If these chilling figures do not stir the guts of those who can and have the capacity to intervene to stop the genocide, all is lost.
"In recent conflicts, the number of indirect deaths is between three and fifteen times higher than the number of direct deaths. Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths for every direct death to the 37,396 recorded deaths, it is not implausible to estimate that as many as 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributed to the current conflict in Gaza. Using the 2022 Gaza Strip population estimate of 2 375 259, this would translate to 7-9% of the Gaza Strip's total population. A report on 7 February 2024, when the direct death toll was 28 000, estimated that without a ceasefire there would be between 58 260 deaths (without an epidemic or escalation) and 85 750 deaths (if both were to occur) by 6 August 2024".
Counting the dead in Gaza: difficult but essential by Rasha Khatib, Martin McKee and Salim Yusuf. The Lancet. Published 5 July, 2024. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(24)01169-3
