Physicians, Heal Thyselves

Ninety-nine medical personnel — doctors, surgeons, nurses — 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.” That astonishing figure is nearly three times the number — 41,000 —put out by the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry. But that crazed claim is not the only thing wrong with the letter. 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:

The Gaza death toll is “already greater than 118,908, an astonishing 5.4% of Gaza’s population,” and “everyone in Gaza is sick, injured, or both—including every national aid worker, every international volunteer, and probably every Israeli hostage.” These are just a couple of the wildly exaggerated and demonstrably false claims made in an open letter signed by 99 American physicians, surgeons, and nurses who purport to have volunteered since the Hamas massacre last year.

Curiously, the authors felt the need to add a caveat when discussing Israeli hostages—“probably sick.” Apparently, while they are absolutely certain that every one of Gaza’s two million residents is on death’s door, the hostages who have been starved, tortured, and held underground for a year? Well, probably.

If one needed a clue as to how flimsy the claims in this letter are, they need only revisit an earlier version of the same letter published in July by many of the same signees. In that original letter, these trustworthy medical professionals warned that more than 60,000 people had died of starvation in the Strip since October 7, 2023.

Claiming that Israel has a “deliberate policy” of starving Gaza that was supposedly “not in dispute,” the signees cited a report by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) as their evidence. Yet, the IPC had already revised its earlier warning, finding no evidence of famine in Gaza. Naturally, it’s the earlier warning—the one the IPC itself said was wrong—that the authors chose to cite.

Israel has since the war against Hamas began allowed in about 1,100,000 tons of aid in 54,000 truck deliveries to Gaza. There is no evidence, despite the letter’s claims, of Israel trying to starve the civilians. And there has been no evidence of famine anywhere in the Strip.

But in the latest version, the 60,000 dead from starvation? Well, they’ve vanished. Instead, we now have vague claims of “widespread malnutrition.”

The sources these medical professionals use in both letters to conjure up their wild figures are easy to debunk. For example, they cite The Lancet as an authority, touting it as the “most prestigious medical and public health journal in the world.” They conveniently omit that the staggering figure of 186,000 deaths they reference didn’t come from peer-reviewed data or even a study—it was lifted from an opinion piece published in The Lancet’s “correspondence” section. Hardly the rigorous science you’d expect from such a distinguished source.

That absurd figure of “186,000 deaths” was not from any study or peer-reviewed data in The Lancet; it was only contained in a letter sent to the journal by three anti-Israel correspondents — Rasha Khatib, Martin McKee, and Salim Yusuf — who plucked the figure from the air, hoping that some readers would be fooled into thinking that that figure bore the imprimatur of The Lancet’s editors.

In addition to the liberal use of wildly inaccurate figures pulled from wholly dubious sources, the letter is sprinkled with a generous dose of modern-day blood libels, such as the vile lie that Israel is deliberately targeting women and children, describing the “unbearable cruelty” inflicted on them, with women “shredded by [American] bombs” and children “murdered.”

Does the IDF “deliberately target women and children”? Or does it, rather, do everything it can to minimize civilian casualties, with an elaborate warning system to let civilians know about areas and buildings that are about to be targeted? Already by March of this year, the IDF had dropped nine million leaflets, sent fifteen million text messages, and made sixteen million robocalls to warn civilians away from danger. Israeli pilots routinely abort about half of their missions if they see too many civilians near the targets.

The standard measure of whether a war is being conducted within acceptable limits is to calculate the ratio of civilian-to-combatant deaths. The UN has said that in all the wars fought since 1945, that ratio has been, on average, 9:1. In Afghanistan, the Americans managed to bring that ratio down to 4:1, and in Iraq, to 3:1. But the IDF has achieved in the Gaza war a ratio that no other army has come close to attaining. Of the 42,000 deaths that the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry now claims, the IDF has calculated that at least 18,000 were Hamas fighters. Furthermore, before October 7, about 800 Gazans died each month from “natural” causes or causes unrelated to the war — diseases, accidents, etc. — and in the past year, that amounts to a total of 9600 such deaths. If we subtract from 42,000 both the 18,000 who were Hamas members and the 9600 who died of natural causes, that leaves 14,400 civilian deaths. The civilian-to-combatant ratio in Gaza, then, is 14,400: 18,000, or considerably less than 1:1. No wonder that British Colonel Richard Kemp calls the IDF “the most moral army in the world” and Professor John Spencer of West Point, a specialist in urban warfare, has concluded that “Israel has implemented more precautions to prevent civilian harm than any military in history—above and beyond what international law requires.”