The Undead of Gaza
Accounting for Israel's genocide
By any estimation the availability of graphic images of dead and dying civilians in Gaza (70% of whom have been women and children) is unprecedented in the history of modern conflicts. In the face of the overwhelmingly cruel bloodlust demonstrated by the Israel Defence Force, which to date has acted with apparent impunity and legal immunity (consider alone the failure to prosecute the sadistic sodomists of Force 100, the “prison guards” and torturers of hundreds of men and children in Sde Teiman) it’s crucial that as clear a picture of the extent of Israel’s genocide, as the various agencies which at some stage will hopefully be charged with the task, is obtained.
Several have already commented on the dehumanisation of the Palestinians by their oppressors (amongst whom I include the UK, Germany, France, Australia and of course, the United States and its executioner-in-chief: Israel) and the media whose “client-journalism” reporting serves the pro-Zionist propagandists who have by hook or by crook come to positions of power in those countries. But it is only when you come to the problem of estimating the extent of the carnage and of each of the massacres and confirming the numbers with anything amounting to confidence that you can truly appreciate the extent to which the West has forgotten the people of Palestine (if it ever recognised them as people in the first place).
It was during the first week or weeks of the massacre of the population of Gaza that I first learned of Israel’s greatest insult to those it has slain. In the concentration camps of Poland, Czechia, Ukraine and the Baltic, Jews and others had identification numbers tattooed on their forearms. Israel’s barbarism has not quite extended to such a graphic mimicry of the enemy of its founders and ancestors, but I was appalled to learn that in Palestine’s beleaguered concentration camp, each inmate is identified by a number attributed to them under the terms of the occupation. This being the case it is surely preposterous to suggest that since 2007 Gaza has not been under occupation and yet another brutal fallacy peddled by those who might wish the Palestinians as a population “disappeared”.
It gets worse. As I write, the combat-caused death toll in Gaza since 7 October 2023 stands at 42,603. Researchers on behalf of “The Lancet”, the UK journal of medical science have estimated that the death toll of those shot or bombed out of existence could be an under-estimate of the final death toll occurring as a result of this genocide by a factor of between 400% and 1500%. But 42,603 is only a fraction of the figure killed in combat to date.
42,603 represents the number of dead whose remains have been physically identified and associated with the identity number each individual corpse, in life was given by its captors, the State of Israel. In other words, if you are Palestinian, then you are not allowed to be dead without the agreement of Israel.
Lists of the dead have been shared in the alternative media with the help of Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, The Grayzone, TRT, Novara Media and others. None of these lists was comprehensive because each had to tally with what Israel would verify.
It is clear that in their hundreds and thousands, bodies lie beneath Gaza, crushed under the weight of the buildings they used to call home despite the privations of the Occupier. Those homes were turned into the weapons of their destruction by Israel. Bodies torn apart, crushed beyond identification lie in mass graves beneath the buildings. Thousands may never be identified, simply because they had the lack of integrity required when getting murdered, to prevent themselves from being blown into unidentifiable pieces.
There is substantial evidence of mass graves in the environs of hospitals, Shifa in Gaza City and Nasser in Khan Younis. One can only imagine what will be discovered once northern Gaza is re-opened; that’s if the area ever faces investigation or scrutiny by the international community or by officers of either of the international courts. On the basis of what occurred in Be’eri at the weekend, 3 kilometres from the fence which incarcerates the Palestinians …
the Sukkot “Preparing to Settle in Gaza” Conference organized by Likud party and Nahala group (https://www.nachalaisrael.org/) which had more the appearance of a Jewish wedding party than any serious conference, but which was a serious attempt by Netanyahu’s Likud to portion off into settlements, the land on which the IDF is currently slaughtering and starving the remaining 400,000 Palestinians of the area who refused to flee when ordered to.
… it would seem highly unlikely that anyone will be permitted to survey this killing field at any time in the future. I suppose it’s up to the settlers whether they feel comfortable building their new lives on the torn, burnt and buckled bodies of others. Settler leaders like Daniella Weiss and Security Minister Ben G’vir seem perfectly comfortable with the prospect … they have form on this front, as, no doubt did many of the “prevail at whatever cost to the Palestinians” minded mob at this rally. One hopeful individual suggested to a western mainstream press reporter that Ireland and the UK are only too willing to accept all the 1,000,000 Palestinians who might otherwise harbour hopes of retaining their homeland … even if their homes have been destroyed. Funny that … I thought it was the UK government which sent the Zionists to Palestine in the first place, simply because it couldn’t stand the prospect of European Jewry moving en masse to England. My, how times change and how my government must’ve changed its thinking regarding inbound, brown-skinned refugees, if this is the case.
During the first twelve months of the genocide we’re told that on five separate occasions the IDF sent standard freight trucks laden with the human remains of detainees of Teiman and other camps into Gaza … returning them whence they were abducted, but only once they had acquired a state of decomposition which defies identification. Such is the approach, one doctor from Liverpool who has been to Gaza twice suggested that it was impossible to confirm whether media reporting of 81 corpses being returned in what the driver referred to as “the load”, or whether the parts of 100 or more had been loaded in blue bags onto the backs of each lorry.
Any prospect of reuniting the contents of these bags with the loved ones of the people to whom the parts belonged is, at this point, gone. The opportunity for these deeply religious people to be given the appropriate rites, long gone. But this is all a part of the Israeli playbook: the dehumanisation, the humiliation, the subordination, the extermination.
In the first months of the massacre, hospital management throughout the Strip attempted to report each death, capturing the personal details and the Israeli identification number of each body. Israel has never refuted the claims of the health establishment in Gaza (which western media outlets insisted for several months is “Hamas-run and therefore the numbers of dead reported had not been verified”. What that was about God, Yahweh, or Allah alone knows, since each death was confirmed by its Zionist’s identification number). Once the hospitals were overrun however and themselves became targets, first of Zionist lies about being centres of Hamas military operations and then of bombs and tank rounds, any presumption that the Palestinians could effectively “keep score” with respect to the slaughter, was abandoned. As it was, hospitals only reported deaths caused by wounding or outright murder and so this no longer provides anything resembling a complete toll of loss. As more Palestinians die from entirely preventable causes - previously acquired and untreated diseases, infections caused by the dire conditions, starvation - how will their deaths be accounted for? The hospitals lack the capacity to treat the sick who are not wounded. Will they simply be given the last rites as appropriate to the muslim faith and laid to rest? How many babies will die without ever having been registered with the Occupier’s registry, their lives never acknowledged, born into chaos, died in pain?
The perfidy and obfuscation of the western media was hung out to dry a week ago four Special Forces recruits died outside Haifa, when their training facility at Binyamina was struck by a missile fired from southern Lebanon. Soon thereafter, virtually every mainstream media source in the western world (the WEOG group of nations) was carrying the names of the four (19 year old) victims and photographs of each of them in what were presumably happy times (despite the constant threat posed by Muslim fanatics positioned on each of Israel’s borders). On Sky Television in the UK, Kay Burley, the news anchor repeated, with a sorrowful crack in her voice, that the now dead Israeli’s had been “JUST 19 years’ old!”. There was an immediate response on social media from those of us who have been astonished by the callous disregard for the lives of the 42,000 Palestinians, the veracity of whose deaths to that point had been had been in question, according to many of these “news” outlets.
Sky, to its limited credit and by way of apology by inclusion, later last week ran a report on the short life and excruciating death of Shaaban al Dalou, also 19 at the time of his death in the tent he had erected with his family on the outside of the al-Aqsa Hospital in Dier al Balah, central Gaza just a week after he had been injured by a bomb blast at one of the few remaining mosques, where he’d been proudly reciting the entire Quran, having only recently memorised it.
Whilst searching for some of the details of Shaaban’s demise, I just came across a link to a New York Times article which typifies the West’s problem with reporting Palestinian deaths. The description of the post reads:
“A video of Shaaban al-Dalou burning to death after an Israeli strike at a hospital has stoked criticism from Israel's allies and highlighted the plight of people trapped in Gaza.”
… When you go to the article itself, the headline begins:
“He Dreamed of Escaping Gaza”
Western media and the governments which are their clients will never accept that what the Palestinians dream of, more than anything, is to live freely in Gaza and travel the world as free men and women when they wish to, not in some desperate attempt to “escape” their homes, unless it means a return to the land stolen from their ancestors in 1948 or in the years before or since.
The description of the article above meanwhile frames it in terms of what the implications of the video of Shaaban’s death (alongside his mother) have been for “Israel’s allies”. Well boo-hoo for Israel’s poor allies.
To be clear, had a video of this poor boy dying in a true holocaust not been posted online by his distraught relatives , then Shaaban and his mother might have been unaccounted for in the daily, increasing death toll; if the corporeal existences of the two of them were (as they were) reduced to ashes then the Israelis … and their allies …would have been able to rely on a degree of plausible deniability which no writ of habeas corpus could have resolved.
I recall on my first day at private school, back in 1970, being acutely aware of the fact that a number had become part of my identity and that certain of my possessions, by convention, were identifiable by this number alone. Without the correct number attributed to it, the thing which was supposed to be yours, was not yours … and there were many of your neighbours who were ready to stake their claim to what you had owned, and they did. When I think about that time, the attribution of a number to each child was typical of an English approach towards depersonalisation, teaching us emotional distance and cold objectivity. If you are a number you no longer need to be considered for who you are or have been. Like an item in a supermarket, each identifiable by its SKU or its barcode, independently from branding, packaging or content. You become an accounting item.
The notified and enumerated dead of Gaza can be associated with names, with pictures, with poetry and prose they may have written, with acts of valour, with families, parents, grandparents and with children, with homes, with songs and with journeys, with loved ones, with towns and cities.
What remains are those we will never truly account for. They are and shall remain, the undead of Gaza. May their souls and their loss haunt the lives of those who would steal their homes, for all eternity.