Kathy E. Gill 🇺🇦
Hamas killed 1,200 Israeli citizens in a country of 9.4 million, about 1 in every 10,000.
#Israel has killed about 20,000 or 1 in 100 Palestinians in the #Gaza Strip. “We don’t know how many are buried under the rubble of their homes,” according to the U.N. agency that works directly with the Gaza Health Ministry.
Johns Hopkins University has found “no evidence” that the Ministry has inflated its data.
gnutelephony
@kegill On a daily average Gaza has a higher death rate than the gas chambers at Auschwitz... and this is even before counting the still undocumented losses, let alone those who will die from starvation and disease. At Auschwitz, too, it was starvation and disease that killed the most, not the gas.
gnutelephony
@kegill close to two decades ago, as I was collaborating with Russell Means, and also knew Kevin Annett, I was asked to help evaluate boarding school sites by the Oceti Sakowin council. But how to do so correctly? I contacted and we collaborated with the Simon Wiesenthal center. They similarly pointed out, even at Auschwitz, it is harder (though certainly possible) to designate a death camp by exceptional starvation and disease alone, but is easier to do so with affirmative killing.
Kathy E. Gill 🇺🇦
Do you have a citation for that comparison, please?
Most of us probably forget about starvation and disease because of the visceral horror of the gas chambers.
gnutelephony
@kegill they suggested evaluating the long term average death rate, too. Doing this, Auschwitz operated over 5 years, with a death rate 16% per year. 5% per year they asserted was affirmative killing (gas chambers and other killings). This led to us scoring past sites, like the Carlyle Industrial School, for which we could document a 14% death rate per year. But only 1% of that could be documented as "affirmative" killings.
gnutelephony
@kegill Gaza, an enclosed, isolated civilian population already forced to live under harsh conditions, already fully met the 19-20th century definition of a civilian concentration camp, much like the British ran camp for the Boers in South Africa once did. That it is self ran does not change this, just like it did not change how one defines the Warsaw ghetto. But is it a death camp?
gnutelephony
@kegill if I evaluate it under the same criteria, of a trapped and contained civilian population with an affirmative death rate of at least 1% every few months, and an intent to continue this war for a year, clearly it will be at least comparable to Auschwitz. Since there many be so many yet uncounted dead, and many who will die from disease and starvation, it may easily exceed it. Should humanity wait just so we can make a monument afterward, or do we act now while lives may still be saved?
gnutelephony
@kegill its a question of facing reality. I had to evaluate and at times mediate very difficult situations that most preferred to walk away from simply because I refused to be yet another who does so. I had found it most difficult and yet so necessary when speaking formally with other national governments on genocide in North America, and felt it essential to do so as correctly as possible.
Kathy E. Gill 🇺🇦
Thank you.
Your experience is unlike that of anyone I currently know. I’m having a hard time considering the emotional toll of that kind of research.
What Hamas did was horrific.
What Israel is doing is horrific.
And what Israel has been doing for decades is beyond my comprehension. I was unaware of the conditions in the OPT until this fall. (There is only so much one can attend to, but still. I was dismayed at my ignorance.)
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