This is a back-of-the-napkin calculation that captures one way of contextualizing the magnitude of destruction Israel has caused in Gaza since October 7. This type of comparison is ignored by the US media.

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 soe of 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.

The article above was published in Israel 23 days after the Hamas attack. It exposes the plan of the Netanyahu government to expel Palestinians from Gaza, but has received almost no attention in the US media.