Back in early March when the Israel/Gaza conflict was still in its fifth month, longtime progressive icon Ralph Nader published an important column in Common Dreams arguing that the official Palestinian death toll widely cited in media reports probably represented a huge underestimate of the actual reality.

His piece opened as follows:

Since the Hamas raid penetrated the multi-tiered Israeli border security on October 7, 2023 (an unexplained collapse of Israel’s defensive capabilities), 2.3 million utterly defenseless Palestinians in the tiny crowded Gaza enclave have been on the receiving end of over 65,000 bombs and missiles plus non-stop tank shelling and snipers.

The extreme right-wing Netanyahu regime has enforced its declared siege of, in its genocidal words, “no food, no water, no electricity, no fuel, no medicine.”

The relentless bombing has destroyed apartment buildings, marketplaces, refugee camps, hospitals, clinics, ambulances, bakeries, schools, mosques, churches, roads, electricity networks, critical water mains—just about everything.

The U.S.-equipped Israeli war machine has even uprooted agricultural fields, including thousands of olive trees on one farm; bulldozed many cemeteries; and bombed civilians fleeing on Israeli orders, while obstructing the few trucks carrying humanitarian aid from Egypt.

With virtually no healthcare left, no medications, and infectious diseases spreading especially among infants, children, the infirm, and the elderly, can anybody believe that the fatalities have just gone over 30,000? With 5,000 babies born every month into the rubble, their mothers wounded and without food, healthcare, medicine, and clean water for any of their children, severe skepticism about the Hamas Health Ministry’s official count is warranted.

Nader’s piece originally appeared under the explosive headline “How Many Gazans Have Already Died? Perhaps 200,000.” But apparently an editor later changed the title to something much less inflammatory.

At the time I read it, I thought Nader’s speculative figure of 200,000 Gazan deaths seemed far too high, but the basic point he was making was a very reasonable one. The official body count regularly provided by Gaza’s Public Health Ministry seemed restricted only to those directly killed by Israeli bombs or bullets, excluding the considerable number of Gazans whose cause of death was far more ambiguously connected to the Israeli military campaign. Given the overwhelmingly lockstep pro-Israel skew of the Western global media, that sort of extreme caution was certainly necessary in any public releases, but it must have greatly understated the true civilian death-toll from the conflict.

Nader quoted an article published a few days earlier by a Washington Post reporter that had emphasized the horrific conditions and risk of serious famine.

The bulk of Gaza’s more than 2 million people face the prospect of famine—a state of affairs that constitutes the fastest decline in a population’s nutrition status ever recorded, according to aid workers. Children are starving at the fastest rate the world has ever known. Aid groups have been pointing to Israel restricting the flow of assistance into the territory as a major driver of the crisis. Some prominent Israeli officials openly champion stymying these transfers of aid.

Nader quoted numerous other international officials and relief experts who broadly supported this same analysis, notably including UN Secretary-General António Guterres, while also noting that as far back as late 2023, the chair of public health at the University of Edinburgh had predicted that a half-million Gazans might die during 2024 if conditions continued unabated.

Nader’s provocative column received relatively little attention at the time even in alternative media circles, perhaps because most regarded his conclusions as so wildly implausible. But he now seems to have been completely vindicated as The Lancet, one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious medical journals, published a short piece estimating the total death toll from Israel’s nine month destruction of Gaza. The three authors argued that the figure would probably exceed 186,000.

The article emphasized that across a wide range of previous conflicts, indirect deaths have always greatly exceeded direct ones, with the ratio generally being between 3 and 15. We would certainly expect this to be the case in Gaza, given that Israelis have destroyed nearly all of Gaza’s hospitals and the bulk of its housing stock, while also inflicting famine conditions upon the suffering population. So the authors applied a conservative ratio of 4 for illustrative purposes, thus producing their estimate of 186,000 total deaths, but the true figure might easily be much higher. In a recent interview, the eminent political scientist John Mearsheimer certainly accepted this analytical framework, and indeed felt that total might be too low.

Moreover, even the direct toll of deaths may have become a serious undercount, as I had argued in May:

Although the official Gazan death-toll reported in our media has remained relatively constant in recent weeks, this is almost certainly an illusion. During the first month or two of the massive Israeli attack, the Gazan Public Health Ministry had maintained very detailed rosters of the dead, including the names, ages, and ID codes of the victims, and regularly released updates of the total, so those numbers seemed absolutely solid. But the Israeli assault soon targeted all of Gaza’s government offices and hospitals, and by early December, the Gazan officials responsible for tabulating the dead had themselves been killed or gone missing, so the count naturally tended to stagnate, even as conditions horrifically worsened for the surviving Gazans.

After less than three months of the Israeli slaughter, some 22,000 Gazans had officially been reported dead, but now after more than seven months of starvation and continuing attacks, including the destruction of all of Gaza’s hospitals and medical facilities, the official body-count reported in our media has only increased to around 34,000, which seems highly implausible…

A recent front-page story in the New York Times reported the tragic case of a particular Palestinian-American pharmacist living in New Jersey, who had personally lost 200 relatives killed in Gaza, including his parents and siblings. That single datapoint indicated the magnitude of the possible media under-count after seven months of horror, and Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia suggested something similar in a recent interview. Although solid estimates are impossible, I’d think a civilian death toll of 100,000 or even something considerably higher seems perfectly plausible at this date.

These very large death-tolls originally suggested by Nader and now endorsed in the Lancet may shock many readers, but such skeptical reactions are unwarranted. After just a few weeks of the Israeli assault, the Financial Times had calculated that the level of destruction inflicted upon much of densely-populated Gaza was already worse than what had been suffered by many German cities following years of the Allied strategic bombing campaign during World War II:

The catastrophic destruction of northern Gaza in less than seven weeks has approached that caused by the years-long carpet-bombing of German cities during the second world war https://t.co/Hm0YiTNOjr pic.twitter.com/vC3Nx3BP5X

— Financial Times (@FT) December 7, 2023

Moreover, such mass slaughter of Gazan civilians was the obvious, declared intent of the Israeli government. In late December, South Africa filed a 91 page legal brief with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) heavily documenting Israel’s publicly avowed plans for genocide, and within weeks, the ICJ jurists had issued a series of near-unanimous rulings supporting those charges. Given that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly identified the Palestinians with the biblical tribe of Amalek, whom the Hebrew god commanded be exterminated down to the last newborn baby, and so many other senior Israeli leaders have issued similar pronouncements, we should hardly be surprised that more than nine months of relentless bombing and shelling have successfully accomplished at least a portion of that stated goal.

Although the Lancet piece was widely cited and discussed across the Internet and much of the mainstream media, it was ignored by the prestigious print edition of the New York Times and only mentioned in a short online piece by a London-based Times staffer.

To a considerable extent, the Israel/Gaza conflict has become a war of narratives and propaganda, and from the beginning it was obvious to me that although the claims made by Israel and its advocates have generally been extremely unreliable, they were almost invariably accepted and promoted by the lock-step pro-Israel Western media.

This had been demonstrated almost immediately as the most ridiculous charges made by such propagandists received gigantic global media attention despite having absolutely no basis in reality. As I wrote in late October:

The last week has also brought greater clarity to other important issues. In the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attack, the Western media was awash with the most outrageous claims of horrific Hamas massacres, including the beheading of 40 Israeli babies, which dominated the British newspaper headlines and filled American electronic media, even reaching the lips of President Joe Biden:

However, those ridiculous stories, apparently originating with a particularly fanatic leader of Jewish settlers, have now completely disappeared from the pro-Israel media, thereby demonstrating their utter falsehood. But before vanishing, such dramatic claims probably embedded themselves in the memories of the low-information voters who constitute the bulk of the population, and therefore achieved their obvious propagandistic purpose by permanently tainting Hamas militants as monstrously brutal baby-killers.

Meanwhile, important contrary information has received much less attention. I’d previously mentioned the short interview of an Israeli woman with two young children who emphasized that the Hamas militants who occupied her home for a couple of hours had been quite respectful to her family. I had also reported the eyewitness testimony of a survivor from a Kibbutz near Gaza who explained that the civilians had been killed when the Israeli military attacked the Hamas fighters holding them.

Furthermore, the official list of dead Israelis indicates that nearly all of the victims were non-elderly adults, with a large fraction being soldiers or security personnel, hardly suggesting a policy of indiscriminate slaughter:

In an article published the following week, I explained that despite its total absurdity, that grotesquely fictional account of the 40 beheaded Israeli babies had considerable lasting impact, as did the next atrocity-hoax that suddenly appeared:

That ridiculous story had come from a fanatic Jewish settler and even Israeli military spokesmen refused to damage their credibility by endorsing the hoax, which was quickly debunked and vanished from pro-Israel media outlets, especially since almost no Israeli babies had actually died in the Hamas attack. But even so, the grotesque and gripping image apparently embedded itself in many Western minds.

For example, former CIA analyst Larry Johnson has a strong military background, and he has been an important voice sharply critical of Israel’s actions, helping to confirm that it was indeed an Israeli missile that killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians sheltering at Gaza’s largest Christian hospital. I regularly visit his independent blogsite for his astute commentary on the current conflict.

But last week, I was absolutely shocked to discover that some of Johnson’s military friends apparently believed in the “beheaded babies” hoax, forcing Johnson to still defensively insist that there was no evidence for it.

Although that particular atrocity-hoax has disappeared from the media, just a couple of days ago an equally outrageous story emerged, as an Israeli activist suddenly declared—four weeks after the alleged event—that the Hamas fighters had roasted Israeli babies in an oven, with his account quickly reaching the tabloid headlines and easily eclipsing coverage of the enormous Palestinian death-toll at a bombed refugee camp.

By his appearance, the originator of this bizarre tale once again seemed to be a fanatic Jewish settler, perhaps even a friend of the one who had launched the previous beheading hoax. But in this particular case, there might actually be a nugget of truth behind the claim. As mentioned above, the Israelis had blasted the homes occupied by Hamas militants and their Israeli hostages with Hellfire missiles, reducing all the occupants to charred corpses, and perhaps one of these had been a baby. But if so, Israeli missiles rather than a kitchen oven had been responsible for the roasting.

Given the rapid collapse of the previous beheaded-babies hoax, I had assumed that the media would dismiss and ignore this new one, especially since it had suddenly been “remembered” so many weeks after the fighting had ended; but I was mistaken. My local Palo Alto newspaper is as mainstream and respectable as can be imagined, but relies upon wire services for all of its foreign news, and it headlined the story, treating it with complete credibility. As a consequence, many of America’s top technologists and billionaire venture capitalists—who may normally pay little attention to foreign policy issues—are probably now convinced that Hamas has been roasting babies, an entirely imaginary atrocity, while scarcely being aware that so many thousands of Gazan children and infants have been killed—sometimes even being roasted alive—by Israeli bombs and missiles.

Perhaps partly as a result of that horrifying front-page story in our local newspaper, the following day Palo Alto witnessed one of its largest political demonstrations in decades. Hundreds staged a pro-Israel rally just outside City Hall, waving a sea of Israeli flags and demanding the release of the Israeli captives, sentiments endorsed by numerous speakers, including the Mayor. For generations, famously liberal Palo Alto has been in the forefront of every progressive cause, and just a couple of years ago a huge Black Lives Matter street-mural glorifying a convicted cop-killer had spent weeks blocking downtown traffic near that same location. Perhaps a few of the residents have begun feeling a little uneasy about the ongoing slaughter of so many children in Gaza by American-supplied bombs and missiles. But if so, the massive display of pro-Israel sentiment will probably suppress any such public concerns in this small city of 60,000.

After the roasted baby atrocity-hoax dissipated, the Israeli government and its close media allies such as the New York Times quickly launched a new and much larger propaganda drive that I discussed in an early January article:

The latest wave of very doubtful claims has focused upon second-hand stories of Hamas gang-rapes and sexual mutilations. These accounts only came to light two months after the events in question and lacked any supportive forensic evidence, with many of the claims coming from the same individuals behind the beheaded babies hoax, suggesting that they are equally desperate propaganda ploys. Journalists Max Blumenthal, Aaron Mate, and others have discussed the extreme credulity of the Times and other media outlets in promoting these blatantly fraudulent stories. Many of these points are summarized in a brief video discussion:

Inspired by my reporting at @TheGrayzoneNews, this brilliant takedown by @propandco provides the strongest and most accessible refutation of the bogus atrocity propaganda Israel concocted to justify its genocidal rampage in Gaza

Watch and share it widely pic.twitter.com/Q8XawKN07Y

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) December 27, 2023

Meanwhile, consider the very strong evidence from silence. According to news reports, small GoPro cameras were worn by the attacking Hamas militants, which recorded all their activities, and the Israelis recovered many of these from their bodies and began carefully examining hundreds of hours of this extensive video footage. They surely would have soon released a video compilation providing any incriminating evidence that they found, yet I’m not aware of a single public clip that shows any such brutal atrocities or mass killings, strongly suggesting that very little of that occurred. Indeed, the Gray Zone discovered that the main photograph provided of an allegedly raped and murdered Israeli woman actually turned out to be that of a female Kurdish fighter from years earlier that had been plucked off the Internet, demonstrating the apparent desperation and dishonesty of the pro-Israel propagandists promoting these stories.

Although lacking any supporting evidence and being highly implausible, the Hamas gang-rape stories went publicly unchallenged by virtually all mainstream journalists, and this widespread silent acquiescence probably lent them considerable credibility among those large portions of the public and the political classes who still heavily rely upon mainstream media sources.

The obvious reason for such journalistic silence has been the reign of terror inflicted by pro-Israel activists, who target anyone taking a contrary position. For example, The Hill produces Rising, a popular podcast show with nearly 2 million subscribers that has sometimes offered a mainstream platform to various dissenting figures such as Prof. Jeffrey Sachs. As might be expected, openness to contrary voices drew great hostility from pro-Israel activists who denounced its progressive co-host Brianha Joy Gray, a former press secretary for Bernie Sanders. After Gray emphasized the considerable evidence against those gang-rape claims, she immediately became a leading target of the Israel Lobby’s media enforcers.

Video Link

Then last month, Rising interviewed the sister of an Israeli woman captured by Hamas who repeated those wild charges of gang-rapes. Gray understandably seemed to react with some skepticism to those claims, but once pro-Israel activists began circulating a video clip of her insufficiently respectful attitude and it went viral, the young black woman was immediately purged from the show, with Israeli and pro-Israel publications crowing over that important victory.

Anti-Israel TV presenter FIRED, 2 days after shocking disrespectful exchange with the sister of an Israeli hostage.

The Hills’ Briahna Joy Gray sparked outrage for her interview with Yarden Gonen, the sister of Israeli hostage Romi Gonen live on air on the ‘Rising.’

During… pic.twitter.com/z5j5p9igPs

— Oli London (@OliLondonTV) June 7, 2024

Large numbers of other journalists surely took heed of this object lesson in the potentially serious professional risks of challenging even the most absurd stories promoted by pro-Israel activists.

As I described in another January article, similar extremely harsh methods have been used to cow into silence students, faculty members, and administrators at our universities.

As a consequence of these strong youthful sentiments, anti-Israel demonstrations have erupted at many of our universities, outraging numerous pro-Israel billionaire donors. Almost immediately, some of the latter launched a harsh retaliatory campaign, with many corporate leaders declaring that they would permanently blacklist from future employment opportunities any college students publicly supporting the Palestinian cause, underscoring these threats with a widespread “doxxing” campaign at Harvard and other elite colleges.

A few weeks ago, our uniformly pro-Israel elected officials entered the fray, calling the presidents of several of our most elite colleges—Harvard, Penn, and MIT—to testify before them regarding alleged “antisemitism” on their campuses. Members of Congress severely brow-beat these officials for permitting anti-Israel activities, even ignorantly and absurdly accusing them of allowing public calls for “Jewish genocide” on their campuses.

The responses of these college leaders emphasized their support for freedom of political speech but were deemed so unsatisfactory by pro-Israel donors and their mainstream media allies that enormous pressure was exerted to remove them. Within days, the Penn president and her supportive Board chairman had been forced to resign, and soon afterward Harvard’s first black president suffered the same fate, as pro-Israel groups released evidence of her widespread academic plagiarism to drive her from office.

I am unaware of any previous case in which the president of an elite American college had been so rapidly removed from office for ideological reasons and two successive examples within just a few weeks seems an absolutely unprecedented development, having enormous implications for academic freedom.

The rapid and astonishing purge of two top Ivy League presidents naturally intimidated many others and I later noted the harsh police crackdowns ordered at Columbia University, Emory University, UCLA, and numerous other elite academic institutions:

An important turning point may have come on April 17th when Columbia University President Minouche Shafik, herself of Egyptian origins, was raked over the coals by a Congressional Committee for permitting anti-Israel protests on her campus. Her interrogators claimed that these were “antisemitic” acts and caused some of Columbia’s Jewish students to “feel unsafe,” a dire situation that seemingly trumped both freedom of speech and academic freedom.

Shafik may or may not have agreed with those arguments, but she surely remembered that just a few months earlier her counterparts at Harvard and Penn had both been summarily purged for giving the wrong answers, and she hardly wished to share their fate. So she firmly promised to root out all such public antisemitism at her university and soon afterward 100 helmeted NYC riot police were invited onto the campus to crush the demonstrations and arrest the protesters, mostly charging the latter with “trespassing,” a rather strange accusation given that they were enrolled students on the grounds of their own campus.

This sort of harsh and immediate police crackdown seems almost unprecedented in the modern history of college political protests. Back in the 1960s, there were a few scattered cases of police being called in to arrest militant protesters who had seized and occupied administrative offices at Harvard, paraded around with firearms at Cornell, or burned down a campus building at Stanford. But I have never heard of peaceful political protesters being arrested on the grounds of their own college merely for the content of their political speech.

Although the crackdown at Columbia demanded by those members of Congress was obviously intended to quell American campus protests, it predictably had the opposite effect. Scenes of burly, helmeted riot police arresting peaceful college students on their own campus went viral on social media, inspiring a wave of similar protests at numerous other colleges across the nation, with police arrests quickly following in most locations. By latest count, some 2,300 students have now been arrested at dozens of universities.

The actions by the Georgia State Police at Emory University seemed particularly outrageous, and a Tweet containing a clip of one of those incidents has already been viewed some 1.5 million times. A 57-year-old tenured professor of Economics named Carolyn Frohlin was concerned at seeing one of her own students being wrestled to the pavement and walked towards him only to find herself brutally thrown to the ground, hogtied, and arrested by a couple of hulking officers led by a sergeant. CNN anchor Jim Acosta was utterly shocked when he reported this story…

Even worse scenes took place at UCLA as an encampment of peaceful protesters was violently attacked and beaten by a mob of pro-Israel thugs having no university connection but armed with bars, clubs, and fireworks, resulting in some serious injuries. A professor of History described her outrage as the nearby police stood aside and did nothing while UCLA students were attacked by outsiders, with 200 of the victims then arrested. According to local journalists, the violent mob had been organized and paid by pro-Israel billionaire Bill Ackman.

I have never previously heard of organized mobs of outside thugs being allowed to violently assault peaceful American student protesters on their own campus, something that seems far more reminiscent of turbulent Latin American dictatorships. The closest example that comes to mind might be the notorious 1970 “Hard Hat Riot” in New York City in which hundreds of pro-Nixon construction workers battled similar numbers of anti-war protesters on the streets of lower Manhattan, an incident so infamous that it has an extensive Wikipedia page of its own.

In the latest example of this, just last week three senior Columbia University administrators were removed from their posts when they were discovered to have privately texted each other with messages considered insufficiently supportive and respectful of the agitated accusations of widespread anti-Semitism made by Jewish activists at a public forum held on campus. This situation seems to greatly exceed anything that had happened during the endlessly vilified “McCarthy Era” of the 1950s.

The dishonesty of the Israeli government has been so extreme and the support it received from the global media so complete that even the simplest, most objective factual statements must be viewed with great caution. For more than a month after October 7th, nearly all media stories had reported that 1,400 Israelis had been killed in the Hamas attack, but as time went by I’d grown increasingly skeptical of that figure:

For nearly three weeks I’ve been suggesting with increasing forcefulness that the official figure of 1,400 Israeli deaths from the Hamas attack may have been considerably exaggerated. Here’s what I’d said last Monday:

The total number of Israeli deaths remains uncertain. The government has claimed around 1,400 fatalities, a figure universally reported across the entire global media, but nearly a month after the fighting ending, fewer than 1,100 names have been published, raising serious doubts about the reality of the larger total. Indeed, Blumenthal noted that when Israel’s UN Ambassador distributed horrifying images of the corpses of Israeli civilians killed by Hamas, many of them turned out to be the bodies of Hamas fighters killed by the Israelis. So it seems quite possible that several hundred dead Hamas militants were originally included in that 1,400 total, with the Israeli government being too embarrassed to admit its early mistake.

As far as I know, I was almost alone among Internet writers offering these bold speculations and I naturally received some sharp criticism for my “conspiratorial” thinking. But on Saturday morning, the New York Times carried the following short item:

Some have claimed that even this newly reduced total of 1,200 seems to include many Israeli soldiers who were subsequently killed in the weeks of Gaza fighting, so it might still be considerably inflated.

Just as I’d argued, the apparent reason for the Israeli mistake was that such a large fraction of the bodies recovered had been charred beyond all recognition, making it very difficult to distinguish between Israelis and Hamas attackers. But since the Hamas fighters had only been carrying rifles and other small arms, all those victims must have been killed by explosive tank shells and Hellfire missiles. Indeed, newly released video footage revealed that hundreds of Israeli cars had been incinerated by such munitions, suggesting that many or most of the Israelis killed fleeing the dance festival had probably died at the hands of trigger-happy Apache pilots, who reported that they had blasted anything that moved.

Video Link

BREAKING