This wild and cowardly mass killing of children
More KIDS have been killed in Gaza in just TWENTY MONTHS than were U.S. SOLDIERS in all foreign wars, from Iraq to Afghanistan, across TWENTY YEARS. How can this be happening while we watch?
The Gaza Health Ministry published a list this week of 16,506 children killed by the Israeli military since October 2023. It’s a 486-page PDF:
The first page lists 32 babies. Their age in years (column 2 from left) is given as a zero, since none of them made it to their first birthday.
These are all babies killed by Israeli combat weaponry. The list does not include babies killed by hunger, disease, forced homelessness, loss of parents, or other war-related horrors.
If you choose to skim the document, page after page goes by, listing baby after baby.
The age column remains an unending, soul-crushing string of zeros.
It lists 916 babies, age in years of “zero”, across 27 pages.
Finally, we get a break. Page 28 starts with the one-year-olds.
The list of children aged one who have been killed by the Israeli military’s weapons also goes on for page after page — another 27 pages, in fact.
On page 54, after a total of 1,809 dead children, we transition seamlessly into the two-year-olds. And so on.
In total, 16,506 children are recorded by name as killed by Israeli weapons. Of those:
5,281 were aged 0-5
6,101 were aged 6-12
5,124 were aged 13-17
I won’t show you any pictures today, but this tracks with the deluge of horrific video freely available on X (Twitter), Telegram and other as-yet-uncensored social media. Perhaps the most hair-raising feature of those videos — which are updating by the hour — is how normal life looks like it was for many of these children. They’re dressed for school, with little backpacks, they have nice clothes and fluffy toys, and parents who love them, and it all goes to hell in an instant.
Compare this list of 16,506 kids killed in just 20-odd months (since Israel launched its ethnic cleansing campaign in October 2023) to the death toll among all U.S. military personnel over 20 years, in all of our post-9/11 wars. From the Brown University “Costs of War” project, that totals out at about 15,263 direct U.S. war deaths:
It’s truly mind-boggling to compare. America is one of the largest nations in the world, with a population of more than 340 million, and our military and their families absorbed those losses over 20 long years; and the fallen were grown men (and women) who had volunteered to take on those dangers. The Gaza Strip is not just smaller than any U.S. state, it’s smaller than cities like Chicago; yet it’s families have absorbed a larger loss of life, in a fraction of the time, among their children.
Insult to Injury: The U.S. Taxpayer is Making it Happen!
Finally, consider that this is not just the work of the radical Benjamin Netanyahu government. Our own elected leaders are providing international cover for it, with among other things our United Nations veto power. We’ve also provided more than $17.9 billion in direct financial support — that’s right, we are picking up the tab for an overtly public, 21st century, live-streamed genocide. (The bill rises to more than $22 billion, if we include the $4.86 billion we’ve spent bombing Yemen’s Houthis, who say they’ve been attacking shipping only to protest Israel’s rampage in Gaza.)
Starting under Joe Biden, and continuing under Donald Trump, we’ve massively increased military aide we give to Israel: We Americans are by now paying about 70% of the financial cost of the gutting of Gaza. Donald Trump, like Joe Biden before him, could have shut this down yesterday.
Such unhinged responses by the apologists for genocide under the rubric of fighting terrorism show that you are over the target, Doc. Keep it up.
Take me off your list. Hamas should return the hostages and stop using Palestinians as shields.