Lhe war triggered by the Hamas terrorist carnage on October 7 is only suspended for two more days. The Israeli army may have achieved no decisive success in a month and a half of relentless bombardments, but it is preparing to destroy the south of the Gaza Strip with the same methodical blindness that has already ravaged the north of this enclave.
It is however essential, without waiting for this new escalation, to underline a reality as overwhelming as it is fraught with consequences for the future: in a century of history punctuated by tragedies, the Palestinian people have never endured such suffering and never the children of Palestine have paid such a price for a conflict in which they are, it must be remembered, by definition innocent.
The repression of the Arab uprising of 1936-1939 against the British mandate over Palestine left more than 5,000 dead, before the Nakba, the “catastrophe” of the Palestinian exodus of 1948, inflicted much higher losses, with around 13,000 deaths, mainly civilians, or 1% of the Arab population of a now disappeared Palestine.
Never so many deaths
The scale of this massacre has, over the past seventy-five years, seemed insurmountable, despite the tragedies which have marked Palestinian history since then. The death toll from the bloodiest of them rose to a thousand dead during the first Israeli occupation of Gaza, in 1956-1957; a few thousand deaths in 1970 during “Black September” in Jordan; a few thousand deaths during the 1976 massacres in Lebanon in the Quarantine shantytown and the Tal Al-Zaatar camp; from 800 to 3,000 dead during the 1982 massacre in the Sabra and Chatila camps; 1,200 deaths during the Israeli repression of the first Intifada, from 1987 to 1993; 3,000 deaths during the Israeli repression of the second Intifada, from 2000 to 2005; more than 4,000 dead at the end of the various Israeli offensives against Gaza, from 2008 to 2022.
The death toll from the ongoing war is already 14,854 dead in Gaza as of November 22. These figures from the Hamas health ministry are considered reliable by the United Nations (UN), which has been able to verify the credibility of such sources during numerous previous conflicts. A month and a half of hostilities therefore caused more deaths than the interminable 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 terrible standards of the Palestinian tragedy. One thousand two hundred children are also missing, according to Unicef, the United Nations Children’s Fund, which fears that the remains of many of them are buried under the rubble.
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