Any effort to estimate the number of dead that deviates from Israel’s line is maligned as “blood libel”, writes Alex Foley [photo credit: Getty Images]
Let me tell you a story.
By the spring of 2005, the world was well aware of the grave crimes being carried out in Darfur against the Black population at the hands of Arab Janjaweed militias, with arms, coordination, and air support provided by the Sudanese government.
Determining the death toll proved to be impossible given the limited access to the region. The attempts to generate an estimate are outlined in Darfur and the Crime of Genocide and detail the authors’ efforts to create a model based on combining several sets of flawed survey data to reach a projected death toll between 300,000 and 400,000.
The media had begun to form a consensus around this 300,000 figure, with the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Boston Globe all publishing pieces pegging the number of deaths in this ballpark.
The term ‘genocide’ was circulating, despite Kofi Annan’s reticence. The United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Darfur was compelled to make a quick decision to find evidence of crimes against humanity and potentially individual acts of genocide, but could not find evidence of a top-down conspiracy to commit genocide.
The US, by contrast, had already made an uncharacteristically quick decision in 2004.
After commissioning a survey of Sudanese refugees in neighbouring Chad, the then US Secretary of State Colin Powell told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “[…] the evidence leads us to the conclusion […] that genocide has occurred and may still be occurring in Darfur.” The House passed continuing resolution 467 in 2004, declaring the atrocities in Darfur a genocide and condemning the UN for its failure to act.
Then something changed. Two flights crossed paths between Sudan and the US that would radically alter the way the violence was characterised by American officials.
On 14 April, the new Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice sent Assistant Secretary of State Robert Zoellick to Sudan to assess the situation. Days later, on April 17, the CIA flew Sudan’s Major General Salah Abdallah “Gosh” to Washington.
Zoellick, for his part, quickly walked back Powell’s comments and provided a revised death toll of 60,000, with an upper ceiling of 160,000. Despite widespread incredulity, Zoellick’s diagnosis had a pronounced effect on the media class. News reports from many outlets began utilising the “tens of thousands” figure, ignoring the estimates previously provided.
Why the sudden shift? Gosh was the official “minder” of Osama Bin Laden when he had been in the country in the 90s, and had become a key partner in America’s War on Terror.
He was ostensibly working with the CIA in their efforts to go after al-Qaeda affiliates in East Africa. In his role as the Director of Sudan’s National Intelligence and Security Service, Gosh was able to conduct raids at the US’s behest and turn over terrorism suspects.
The only problem was that Gosh had already been directly implicated in the ongoing genocide. Gosh was ranked second on a leaked list of Sudanese officials responsible for the crimes in Darfur attributed to the UN and he had been named by Congress as having a role in the genocide in 2004.
Zoellick’s role appears to have been to create doubt around the death toll in order to protect the administration’s working relationship with Sudan’s security service.
As a result, the US not only failed to bring a war criminal to justice but provided cover for the violence to continue.
The parallels with the current situation should be immediately obvious. Despite Israel’s insistence that their war is just and that their civilian-to-combatant ratio is “historically low,” a neurotic fixation has formed around the death toll.
Even within the first month of Israel’s assault, when the infrastructure was still in place to accurately count the dead, American Zionists made every effort to undermine the death toll. Senator Tom Cotton said at the time, “ Unfortunately, the media is still relying on the Hamas-controlled ‘Gaza Health Ministry’ for casualty numbers. No outlet should trust propaganda from terrorists.”
Any effort to estimate the number of dead that deviates from Israel’s line is maligned as “blood libel.”
Such was the case when The Lancet published a correspondence from a group of public health researchers that attempted to estimate the total death toll by projecting the number of indirect deaths from downstream effects of the war. “In recent conflicts,” they wrote, “such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths.”
Using a very conservative ratio of four indirect deaths to every one direct death, they came up with the now famous figure of 186,000 deaths. This was at a point when the Gaza Health Ministry’s reported figure was still under 40,000. A new study in The Lancet published in early January, using a three-list “capture-recapture” analysis to compare various reporting sources, suggests that this figure may under-report the real mortality levels by 41%. You can do the math.
When asked about the report, a former State Department spokesperson stated, “the reported number is already far too high, the reported number already is unacceptable.” Journalist Sam Husseini accused him of smirking as he said it.
In a remarkable move, The Lancet went on to publish a bizarre rebuttal by two Israeli doctors. To give you a flavour:
“Did the authors not realise how such blood libels are incited precisely by an authoritative scholar’s ‘purely illustrative’ example that was published as part of a non-peer-reviewed Correspondence and falsely accorded the imprimatur of being a published study in the world’s leading medical journal? The guise of evidence required for ‘crucial for post-war recovery, restoring infrastructure, and planning humanitarian aid will not hide such calumny.”
Earlier in May, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) altered its method of updating on the death toll in Gaza.
The new report provided a breakdown of the proportion of women and children based on those bodies that had been fully identified.
Subscribe Now and Listen to our Podcasts OnThis caused a flurry of erroneous reporting that the death toll had been revised downward, despite OCHA’s assurances that the overall numbers were unchanged. OCHA spokesperson Jens Lark told NBC, “What is new is the level of verification (‘full details have been documented’) for a subset of 24,686 of those fatalities.”
Or, as Fox News reported it, “UN revises Gaza death toll, almost 50% less women and children killed than previously reported.”
Now the US is attempting to stop the publication of the figures from the Gaza Health Ministry. A provision attached to the must-pass national defence bill working its way through Congress would bar the Pentagon from even citing the Ministry’s casualty data. This comes after the House of Representatives voted 269-144 for an amendment to the State Department appropriation bill When charges of genocide are inconvenient, the US simply cooks the books.
As the Biden administration prepared to leave the White House, ProPublica put out a blistering piece documenting how the State Department enabled Israel, stamped out internal dissent, and failed to enforce any of Biden’s “red lines.” Also that week, CBS’ 60 Minutes interviewed former State Department officials who quit their jobs over the administration’s handling of Gaza.
Diplomat Hala Rharrit claimed that her superiors would not even look at the images of what was occurring. “I would show images of children that were starved to death. In one incident, I was basically berated, ‘Don’t put that image in there. We don’t wanna see it. We don’t wanna see that the children are starving to death.’” One can imagine how they regarded the death toll.
Donald Trump does not appear poised to push for the entry of forensic archaeologists into Gaza.
For now, it is up to the people of Gaza to count and identify their dead. As throngs of people march back to their bombed-out homes, families posted the ID cards of loved ones pulled from tattered pockets next to skulls with obvious bullet holes.
If past is prologue, the truth will out. Zoellick went on to serve as the president of the World Bank Group. By the time of his resignation from the State Department in 2006, even he was using the term genocide in connection to Darfur.
Alex Foley is an educator and painter living in Brighton, UK. They have a research background in molecular biology of health and disease. They currently work on preserving fragile digital materials related to mass death atrocities in the MENA region.
Follow them on X: @foleywoley
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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.