The Gaza genocide: Not 65,000 but 680,000! So what?

The world is being told that around 65,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza over nearly two years of war. That number comes from the Gaza health ministry, which records bodies brought to hospitals and morgues.

Even that figure, tens of thousands of men, women and children, is staggering. But a new report, ‘Skewering History: The Odious Politics of Counting Gaza’s Dead’, by two Australian academics argues that the real number of deaths, as of 25 April, is closer to 680,000! That’s more than ten times the number in wider circulation and is more than one in four of Gaza’s pre-war population, erased in less than two years. An estimated 380,000 of those dead were children. Let that sink in.

This revelation could have been a turning point. It should have ended debates over ‘disproportionate response’, shattered the polite evasions of diplomacy, and forced the world to act. Instead, we have silence, denial, shrugs.

The Gaza health ministry’s figures are widely received as credible but ‘conservative’. Their death statistics are restricted to confirmed bodies, leaving out the thousands buried under rubble, the tens of thousands who have starved or died for lack of medicine.

Epidemiologists applied standard conflict mortality methods, using the ratio of indirect to direct deaths common in Iraq, Afghanistan and Congo. Even by the most conservative estimate, the toll exceeds half a million.

Even as these numbers mount, Arab leaders have staged yet another show of ‘solidarity’. After Israeli jets bombed Doha on 9 September to target Hamas leaders, the Gulf states rushed to issue condemnations, convened emergency summits and delivered fiery speeches.

Qatar thundered about sovereignty; Saudi Arabia decried the criminality; the UAE called the strikes treacherous. But beyond the rhetoric, there was nothing — no sanctions, no embargo, no severing of ties. The theatre is grotesque: if Israel can bomb the capital of a US ally, brazenly announce the operation, and yet face no reprisal from Arab governments, what weight do these statements of condemnation or solidarity with Palestine carry?

Not only did Israel attack openly, it bragged about its firepower. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went on to declare, in the presence of US secretary of state Marco Rubio, that Hamas leaders are not safe anywhere, wherever they may be. This was not shadow warfare, it was spectacle.

Israel had struck a country that hosts the largest US airbase in the region, exposing the hollowness of American assurances. It told Arab leaders, plainly, that their sovereignty was irrelevant. Israel will hit whoever, wherever, and Arab governments will do nothing that changes the calculus.

Netanyahu was, in effect, articulating a new doctrine — reserving for Israel the right to bomb any country, at any time, in the name of self-defence. This doctrine of boundless impunity, verbalised in the presence of America’s first diplomat, was in a sense stamped and sealed by simultaneously nodding at the reliability of US–Israel ties — an alliance as “durable as the stones of the Western Wall,” as Netanyahu put it.

At the same moment, many of Washington’s closest allies — France, the UK, Canada, Australia, Belgium — are preparing to recognise the State of Palestine at the upcoming UN General Assembly. The EU has expressed its intention to downgrade trade ties with Israel and sanction some senior Israeli officials.

This recognition too is largely symbolic. It might highlight the collapse of Israel’s moral legitimacy, but it hasn’t forced Israel to alter course. If anything, Netanyahu is doubling down: the annexation of West Bank is accelerating, and so is the flattening of Gaza.

Seen together, these three dots — Gaza’s real death toll, the charade of Arab solidarity, and Netanyahu’s assertion of limitless strike authority — reveal a grim, unyielding reality. Gaza is not just a humanitarian catastrophe; it is a testament to the collapse of the ‘rules-based order’, of international law, of a binding global compact.

Meanwhile, leaders are still issuing communiqués, holding press conferences and calling for ‘restraint’ as if this were a skirmish. While Gaza is being emptied of life. On a scale that dwarfs the atrocities elsewhere that the same leaders condemn. And the best these governments and their leaders have managed so far is the fig leaf of promised recognition. But what is diplomatic recognition for the State of Palestine worth when Palestinians are being bombed out of existence?!

The Gaza genocide has stripped bare the pretence of global diplomacy. History will record that while Palestinians were being wiped out, the most powerful nations equivocated and world leaders stood by and watched the slaughter of men, women and children as if they were watching a horror film.

Ashok Swain is a professor of peace and conflict research at Uppsala University, Sweden. More of his writing may be read here