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Medical personnel who claim to have spent some time as volunteers in Gaza, have put out a letter claiming that the death toll in Gaza is “greater than 118,908.” More about its contents can be found here: “‘60,000 Dead From Starvation’: American Doctors Quietly Retract Grotesque Gaza Libel,” by Rachel O’Donoghue, HonestReporting, October 7, 2024:
It’s the attached appendix, however, that truly reveals the absurdity of these missives. It’s a mishmash of outdated reports from groups like Save the Children and Human Rights Watch, littered with contradictory statistics and cherry-picked quotes from U.S. politicians.
In the latest letter, we’re told at least 118,000 people have died in Gaza since October 7—yet this is the exact same figure given in the previous letter months ago. And then they admitted it was “impossible to accurately estimate how many Palestinians in Gaza have died since October 7.”
Make it make sense.
Meanwhile, one of the signatories, Ali Elaydi, has been making the rounds in the media this week, most recently in an interview with ABC News, where he falsely claimed that Israel is restricting medical supplies from entering Gaza.
Elaydi is lying, but neither at ABC News nor at any of the other media outlets where he has appeared has anyone dared to contradict him or, indeed, to ask him what is the evidence for his claim that Israel restricts medical supplies.
In reality, Israel has explicitly stated that it places no such restrictions on medical aid. The allegation, which originated at the UN, appears to be an attempt to deflect from the UN’s own failures in effectively distributing aid throughout the Strip.
The problem with aid in Gaza is not that it hasn’t been arriving in sufficient amounts, but that once those trucks laded with humanitarian aid — food and medicine — are inside Gaza, those trucks are immediately beset by armed members of Hamas who help themselves to large amounts of that aid before it can be evenly distributed to those who need it the most. They not only steal aid for their own extended families, but also to sell some of it to other Gazans. The amount of aid entering Gaza is sufficient, but it is the distribution of such aid that has become so chaotic and unfair due to Hamas’ grand theft.
And then there’s the irony: shortly after urging President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to “withhold military, economic, and diplomatic support from the State of Israel…until good faith negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians lead to a permanent resolution of the conflict,” the signees admit they don’t “claim to have all the answers” because, well, they’re “simply physicians and nurses.”…
But of course that’s exactly what these signees are offering — “all the answers” to the conflict. And their answer is for the US to “withhold military, economic, and diplomatic support” from the state of Israel until it effectively surrenders, declares a ceasefire in Gaza that will allow Hamas combatants to regroup, and then to proclaim to the world that the terror group is still standing despite “all that the Zionist entity” threw at it.
How many antisemites, or members of The Squad, or the simply gullible, will now start posting online — or quoting approvingly from — the letter from these 99 medical personnel, with their crazed claim of 118,000 deaths in Gaza? Who will point out that this figure is almost three times the figure that Hamas itself — and Hamas is well-versed in inflating its own figures — has put out? Who will put out for public consumption the actual number of civilian deaths in Gaza, which amount to 14,400 once one has deducted from Hamas’ own total of 42,000 the 18,000 combatants that, according to the IDF, have been killed, and the 9600 Gazans who have died from natural causes?