You’ve heard about the pain and suffering of Jewish people, the terrible losses these families are going through because of deaths or Hamas hostage-taking, and President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris engaged in ceremonies to remember those Jewish people who died a year ago.
You may have even heard former president Donald Trump’s accusation that the Biden administration is keeping Israel from winning a “war,” which is hardly a war at all. It’s a slaughter.
What you aren’t hearing or hearing little about in mainstream media are the more than 40,000 Palestinian lives lost in Gaza, not to mention the killing of Palestinians in the West Bank and victims of Israel’s decimating bombings and terrorist assault via exploding cell phones and walkie talkies in Lebanon.
Biden expressed his support for Israel, America’s dogged determination to back and protect the Zionist state and an iron-clad relationship with Israel—despite Israel’s disregard for anything he says about a ceasefire or anything else in Gaza and Lebanon. Plus, the Biden administration keeps sending billions and bombs to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and company.
“U.S. spending on Israel’s military operations and related U.S. operations in the region total at least $22.76 billion and counting. This estimate is conservative; while it includes approved security assistance funding since October 7, 2023.
Supplemental funding for regional operations, and an estimated additional cost of operations, it does not include any other economic costs,” said Brown University’s Costs of War project, in a report made public on the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
Harris, the Democratic Party nominee for president, said, “I will never stop fighting for the release of all the hostages, including the seven American citizens, living and deceased. Hamas’s terrorist attack on October 7 launched a war in Gaza.
I am heartbroken over the scale of death and destruction in Gaza over the past year—tens of thousands of lives lost, children fleeing for safety over and over again, mothers and fathers struggling to obtain food, water, and medicine.”
What you haven’t or are hardly hearing, as usual over the past year, is the suffering of Palestinians. Little about their deaths, their starvation, their bodies buried under tons of rubble, their rape—male and female—as well as their disappearances in the thousands. We’re talking men, women and children.
“The staggering toll includes the more than 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals killed, and nearly 5,500 injured, while more than 41,000 people have been killed in the Gaza Strip, and 96,900 injured,” the United Nations noted.
But are those horrific numbers the only figures we should focus on? “In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths.
Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37.396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.
Using the 2022 Gaza Strip population estimate of 2,375,259, this would translate to 7.9 percent of the total population in the Gaza Strip,” according to an analysis published in The Lancet medical journal.
Meanwhile, Israeli forces were massed near Lebanon and media speculation was an invasion and attack on Iran could be imminent, especially as more ballistic missiles and rockets were fired into Israel Oct. 7.
All of this comes with a major disinformation campaign that says the bitter conflict started a year ago. It didn’t. Israel’s war on Palestine is 70 years old. It includes murder, starvation, sexual assaults, torture, abductions, assassinations, bombings, and every imaginable, and unimaginable, international war crime.
As the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam warned Israel and Prime Minister Netanyahu during his major Saviours’ Day address on February 25, “Who gives you the right to take your life and make your life valuable, and diminish the value of the lives of others? … So Netanyahu is a devalued human being. A great man, but he’s lost his value in the eyesight of God.”
The horror of Israel’s slaughter is taking a deep personal toll on many Americans. At a weekend rally near the White House the Saturday before Oct. 7, an Arizona-based photojournalist disillusioned with media coverage, Samuel Mena Jr., set his arm on fire in an act of protest.
His injuries were not life-threatening and he was taken to a hospital. “How many Palestinians were killed that I allowed to be branded as Hamas? How many men, women, and children were struck with a missile cosigned by the American media?” he had written online prior to the self-immolation. You probably haven’t heard about his story.
Even when lame-stream media and politicians try to fake sympathy for the deaths of Palestinians, they falsely assert, as Biden and Harris do, that Hamas is responsible for the deaths in Gaza because war followed their attacks. Big lie.
Israel is responsible for its slaughter. Israel can stop the slaughter. Israel seems to want to continue the slaughter to eliminate its Palestinian problem. That’s something you need to know and hear.
Follow Naba’a Muhammad, award-winning Final Call editor, on X @RMfnalcall. You can also find him on Facebook. He can be reached via email at [email protected].
