Dozens of U.S. doctors and nurses who have returned from volunteer trips to Gaza say in a scathing new letter that Israel’s assault, along with the famine and epidemics raging across Gaza, have killed a conservative estimate of at least 92,000 Palestinians so far — over double the widely-cited official death count by health officials.
In their message sent to President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and the first lady on Thursday, the group of 45 health care workers say that the things they saw in Gaza are beyond anything they have seen in other conflicts, and will forever be seared in their minds.
“President and Dr. Biden, we wish you could see the nightmares that plague so many of us since we have returned: dreams of children maimed and mutilated by our weapons, and their inconsolable mothers begging us to save them,” they wrote. “We wish you could hear the cries and screams our consciences will not let us forget. We cannot believe that anyone would continue arming the country that is deliberately killing these children after seeing what we have seen.”
The range of horrors the health care workers reported seeing is extremely wide, encompassing dire hunger, grisly injuries and deadly illnesses. While in Gaza, thy saw babies die each day; held babies’ brains in their hands for the first time — and not the last; had to treat children who were shot in the head on a daily basis; and watched desperate families have to feed their newborns with formula mixed with “poisoned water”; among countless other atrocities.
With few exceptions, “everyone in Gaza is sick, injured, or both,” they wrote — including the entirety of the Palestinian population, every aid worker and volunteer, and likely every Israeli hostage. They said that every child under five years old they encountered, both in and out of their care, likely had Hepatitis A.
The spread of illness is due to Israel’s blockade and attacks on the Gaza sanitation system, they said, and will only get worse.
“Israel’s continued, repeated displacement of the malnourished and sick population of Gaza, half of whom are children, to areas with no running water or even toilets available is absolutely shocking,” the letter says.
“It is virtually guaranteed to result in widespread death from viral and bacterial diarrheal diseases and pneumonias, particularly in children under the age of five. We worry that unknown thousands have already died from the lethal combination of malnutrition and disease, and that tens of thousands more will die in the coming months,” they said.
The letter concludes by urging the Biden administration to withhold military, diplomatic and economic support from Israel, and to participate in a global arms embargo, in order to secure a permanent ceasefire as soon as possible.
In an appendix to the letter, the medical workers cite statistics and projections from international experts in order to arrive at their estimate of the death toll, which they caution is — like the official death count of 39,000 Palestinians — also likely a vast undercount.
On top of the official death count, the workers say that the death toll from the famine is likely 37,786 people, a calculation based on estimates from reports by the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) about Gaza and typical death tolls from the levels of hunger the IPC has found in Gaza.
This is far, far higher than the official estimate of 34 people who have died of starvation so far. The vast discrepancy is due to the impossibility of accounting for all starvation deaths, as health officials are only able to count deaths reported by health facilities — many of which are physically out of reach for starving Palestinians, both because they have been severely weakened and because hospitals in Gaza have been overflowing with patients for months.
“All told, it is highly likely that the death toll from starvation matches or even exceeds the death toll from violence in Gaza,” the medical workers said.
The deaths due to Israel’s starvation campaign include babies who only lived for a week before dying, as families have shared with Defense for Children International-Palestine (DCIP) in testimonies published this week. Parents report having to watch their children slowly waste away, completely unable to help them even when they’re admitted to treatment centers.
This includes seven-day-old Abdulaziz Salem, who only knew life in an incubator after dying on March 2 in Kamal Adwan as his mother was also in critical condition. Salem suffered from jaundice and malnutrition during pregnancy before dying of cardiac arrest and lack of oxygen, DCIP said.
“I could not breastfeed my son because I had no food and I became sick,” his mother told DCIP. She said her family was displaced six times while she was pregnant. “There was no oxygen or baby formula in the hospital. My son died, suffocating and hungry.”
The medical workers additionally estimate that Israel’s blockade on medical treatments and attacks on health care workers have killed at least 5,000 Palestinians so far — again, a low estimate, they emphasize as they say with “absolute certainty” that “no small number” of people with medical conditions like cancer or diabetes have died.
These numbers add up to roughly 92,000 people — roughly 4.2 percent of the entire population of Gaza. The estimates of the death toll don’t include the thousands of Palestinians missing and presumed dead under the rubble.
As the letter says, this is still likely much lower than the true death toll. The medical workers reference a recent estimate from an editorial published in medical journal The Lancet in which public health experts said that, going off death tolls from similar modern conflicts and massacres, the true death toll of Palestinians could be 186,000. This, too, is a low estimate, the researchers said.
The impact on children is particularly horrific. The health care workers point out that, even just going off the list of children killed who have been identified, the death toll is equivalent to 1.2 million children being killed in the U.S., adjusted for population.
“We are unaware of a similar proportion of any population being killed and maimed in 10 months of conflict since World War II,” the group said.
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