Amid warnings... The British Guardian: The world is witnessing the final stage of genocide in Gaza

The British newspaper , The Guardian, said that the world is witnessing the final stage of genocide in Gaza, amid grim warnings from genocide studies specialists about the situation in the Strip.

In a sarcastic and critical way, the newspaper began an article by columnist Arwa Al-Mahdawi, asking: “Want to know a fun fact about Palestinians? They are hard to kill. You can bomb them, bury them under rubble, burn them alive, and yet they don’t seem to die at the rate of ordinary people. How do you explain the fact that the death toll in Gaza is almost unchanged, even though it doesn’t seem like a day goes by without another massacre, with famine worsening and disease spreading?”

The writer considered the number of Palestinian dead in Gaza to be staggering: 43,000 Palestinians. This is the official figure given by the most recent media coverage. But this is the number that is not mentioned at all: many articles that have covered Gaza no longer even mention the number of dead.

“Obviously I don’t know the death toll in Gaza,” the writer said. “Partly because the foreign press is not allowed in freely – and I don’t understand why every journalist in the West isn’t horrified by this. At the same time – again, I don’t understand why every journalist in the West isn’t outraged by this – that Palestinian journalists are being killed?”

She noted that there is basically a media blackout. "So it is difficult to assess the death toll. But what I do know is this: citing the official figure of 43,000 dead without providing a long list of caveats seems like journalistic negligence at this point."

First, anyone citing death tolls should take into account the fact that the UN estimated in May (several months ago!) that there were likely 10,000 people buried under the rubble in Gaza who could not be counted. Not to mention the fact that people die from preventable diseases every day because adequate medicines are not allowed into the Strip and the health care system is barely functioning.

But it is important to stress the fact that counting the dead is almost impossible; there is no infrastructure left by which to measure the death toll or mourn them properly. Palestinians are being blown to bits at such an alarming rate that there are often no useful remains to count.

The author recently spoke to Dr Nizam Mahmoud, a British surgeon who worked in Gaza with Medical Aid for Palestinians in August and September, who told her that hospital morgue workers are having to weigh body parts to try to assess the death toll: “So 70kg is one body because they’re bringing body parts.” Mahmoud, like everyone on the ground in Gaza, insists that the official death toll is probably an underestimate.

By this time, many believe the actual death toll could be in the hundreds of thousands. In July, the Lancet medical journal published an article estimating that the total death toll in Gaza could be as high as 186,000—roughly 7.9 percent of its population.

Writing in The Guardian last month, Devi Sridhar, head of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, noted that if deaths continue at this rate, the estimated total death toll by the end of the year will be 335,500. That’s 15% of the population. Sridhar also noted that the Lancet used a conservative estimate and that the actual numbers could be much higher.

Apologists for what is happening will shrug their shoulders and say: This is what happens in war. It is tragic, but it is war; innocent people die all the time. But the truth is that wars have rules and limits. The scale of the destruction in Gaza strongly suggests that this is no longer a war by any normal standard. Indeed, many experts are sounding the alarm that this is now genocide. Yet much of the mainstream media seems to ignore these warning bells, continuing to pretend that this is a normal war and not genocide.

Omer Bartov, an Israeli-American historian who is a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, is one of the experts who believes that what is happening in Gaza constitutes genocide. But he did not always think that was the case.

Intent is an essential element of genocide, which is legally defined as the commission of certain specific acts (including killing and imposing measures intended to prevent births) with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.