Blogging. Blogging Never Changes.

I would say that I am just as surprised as you are that something is getting written here - but then I realize that there is no "you". No one is reading this, a defunct blog that never had much readership even before it went dark almost a decade ago. That said, I started here because I had shit burning a hole inside my head and raging about it in the comments sections elsewhere seemed rude. I post here so I don't end up yelling at people IRL. So here I am, yelling into the internet void again - and I guess it isn't surprising that I'm doing this again now.

So, like they say about eating a whole elephant - start off with one bite. That bite is going to be Biden's criticism of the Gaza Health Ministry death numbers from a few days ago. But be warned, there is a lot more of the elephant to come.

When prompted by a reporter asking about the death numbers from the "Hamas controlled Gaza Health Ministry" he said he had "no notion that the Palestinians were telling the truth about how many people were killed". A t the time, the Health Ministry had said that it was over 6,500 - nearly half of whom were children

There was pushback on this, he was called out for trying to minimize the death and destruction being handed out by Israel. To those of us who view what Israel is doing right now as active and undeniable genocide, we had the president of the United States engaging in genocide denialism. Much of the response the handful of not completely-in-the-tank-for-ethnic-cleansing media outlets pushed was about how everybody - NGOs, the US government, the UN, doctors working in Gaza - everybody had faith in the numbers. That numbers reported historically have proven to be quite accurate. They have pointed at the videos and images of destruction already widely circulated, the piles of bodies, the accounts of people on the ground.

I'm pretty sure the few people who might find their way to this post don't need convincing, but again - the point is to get this out of my head. The question is how does one go about verifying a number like this? Well the Health Ministry's approach was to provide the names. A 212 page long list of the names and ID numbers of the 7,000 people the Health Ministry had verified. That seems pretty conclusive. My verification at the time was to cross-check against the UNRWA death numbers.  There are "over 10,000 in the Gaza Field Office" serving over 2 million Gazans. Roughly one UNRWA worker for every 200 Gazans.  At the time, the UNRWA had reported 35 of its number had been killed - which implies a death toll of 7,000 Gazans. The number reported by the Health Ministry was exactly the number that we would have expected if Israel was making no effort to avoid bombing UN facilities. But Israel is avoiding attacks on UN buildings - which means the Gaza Health Ministry number is obviously an undercount - which makes sense, the Gaza Strip is under constant bombardment. Of course there are people killed that have not been catalogued yet, like the hundreds that are trapped beneath the rubble.

This was an easy analysis that took almost no time at all. The numbers are primary sourced from publicly accessible UN sources. It should have been clearly and plainly obvious to anyone giving it a moment's thought that the number was in the right range, that it was credible - even without knowing that this number has historically been credible. But Biden said it anyways in a presser. Was he shooting off the cuff? Talking about shit he had no clue about? That seems bad - but the alternatives are worse. One alternative is that he doesn't know and no one else knew that the number was believable because no one advising the president gives a shit. Literally zero people with any concern about the Palestinian death toll. That seems a lot worse - but the other alternative is worse than that.  The other possibility is that they knew - that they actually have their own estimate of the numbers killed by Israeli airstrikes and they know that the official Health Ministry number is a serious undercount - but they did this anyways. That this genocide denialism is intentional.

There's been no apology yet. Despite demands from Muslim groups which apparently the White House is supposed to be doing outreach on. They are just ignoring it and moving on. Sadly, this makes sense - because the rate of killing is going to escalate.  6,500 killed in 18 days. 1.500 in the three days since. And that number is a greater undercount because they lost all communications for a big chunk of time in there. It is getting worse, and will continue to do so. And we have been promised a “long and difficult war”. Yesterday, the UNRWA reported its number of lost colleagues at 53. So the number of Gazans killed so far in this "operation" is almost certainly above 10,000.