The war triggered by the Hamas terrorist massacre on October 7th will only be suspended for two days. The Israeli army may not have achieved decisive success in a month and a half of relentless bombing, but it is preparing to destroy the south of the Gaza Strip with the same methodical blindness that has already devastated the north of this enclave.
Without waiting for this new escalation, however, it is important to highlight a reality that is as overwhelming as it is consequential for the future: in a century of history filled with tragedy, the Palestinian people have never endured so much suffering, nor have their children suffered from it Palestine has paid such a price for a conflict in which, it must be remembered, they are by definition innocent.
The suppression of the 1936-1939 Arab revolt against the British Mandate over Palestine resulted in more than 5,000 deaths, before the Nakba, the “catastrophe” of the Palestinian exodus of 1948, caused far greater casualties, with around 13,000 dead, mostly civilians. or 1% of the Arab population of a now vanished Palestine.
There have never been so many deaths
The scale of this massacre has seemed insurmountable for the past 75 years, despite the tragedies that have marked Palestinian history since then. The death toll of the bloodiest of them rose to a thousand during the first Israeli occupation of Gaza in 1956–1957; a few thousand deaths in 1970 during “Black September” in Jordan; a few thousand dead during the massacres in Lebanon in 1976 in the quarantine slums and in the Tal Al-Zaatar camp; 800 to 3,000 dead during the 1982 massacre in the Sabra and Chatila camps; 1,200 deaths during Israel’s repression of the first Intifada from 1987 to 1993; 3,000 deaths during Israel’s repression of the Second Intifada from 2000 to 2005; More than 4,000 dead at the end of Israel’s various offensives against Gaza from 2008 to 2022.
The death toll from the ongoing war in Gaza already stands at 14,854 as of November 22nd. These figures from the Hamas Ministry of Health are considered reliable by the United Nations (UN), as it has been able to verify the credibility of such sources in numerous previous conflicts. A month and a half of hostilities therefore claimed more lives than the endless year of the Nakba. Above all, the number of 6,150 children killed, or more than 40% of the victims, is unprecedented even by the horrific standards of the Palestinian tragedy. One thousand two hundred children are also missing, according to Unicef, the United Nations children’s agency, which fears that the remains of many of them are buried under the rubble.
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