Gaza's 70,000 dead should hit home hard even in a war-weary world

Mourners react as they attend the funeral of Palestinians killed on December 3, by an Israeli strike, at Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, southern Gaza Strip on December 4. AFP

The American essayist Susan Sontag, who spent time in the killing fields of Bosnia, once remarked: “Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers."

The last week of November marked a terrible milestone when the Gaza Ministry of Health announced that the death count in Gaza since the war began in October 2023 reached 70,000, with more than 170,000 Gazans wounded.

Yet, the world barely seemed to have blinked. In comparison, in the nearly four years since the war in Ukraine began, around 15,000 civilians have perished.

The 70,000 dead in Gaza were probably ordinary people – teachers, doctors, labourers, children, scholars. They were born, they once had parents, they might have been parents. They may have walked on the Gazan beach, celebrated birthdays, perhaps had pets. On Thursday nights, they may have walked through the crowded Gaza streets, eating lemon ice and celebrating the weekend. They will never do that again.

Seventy thousand is probably a low estimate given how many bodies remain buried under rubble, unretrieved.

This milestone was reported, but barely. It occurred during a US–brokered “ceasefire,” when the Israeli military continued to attack the Gaza Strip. On the day the figures were announced, two brothers, aged eight and 11, sleeping, were killed by a drone strike. Their lives were cut short in a world where atrocities have become policy, in a world where those killed by drone attack or 200-pound bombs are not given names.

We count the dead because we can no longer name them.

Meanwhile, the humanitarian situation on the ground in Gaza is “deteriorating,” according to aid groups. Attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank continue. The fact that people are starving and sleeping rough, without blankets and warm clothes, as we enter the holiday season of consumer waste and greed, is even more painful.

And the initial compassion and horror one felt when the fatalities began – the shock at 10,000 killed, then 20,000 – has morphed into compassion fatigue. It is not that people do not care, most do, except those on the extreme political right who support Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and view the Gaza “project” as a necessary means of “security” for Israel. But concern, a favourite watchword of the UN, is not enough.

Let’s be frank: 70,000 people killed is evidence of how Palestinian life is undervalued diplomatically and geopolitically.

The statistic arrives in a time of an accountability vacuum. The ICC investigation is stalled; prosecutors are sanctioned. The UN resolutions are vetoed. Humanitarian agencies are sidelined. Such blatant impunity allows the Israeli military to continue, without any tally but its own. They seem to jeer at any criticism of their conduct and attribute it to anti-Semitism. By weaponising anti-Semitism, they erode the full horror of what it actually is.

International journalists are not allowed to record these fallen lives in Gaza. Our incredibly courageous Gaza colleagues continue to do it without us, waiting and suffering along with the rest of the population.

Last month, I attended the Committee to Protect Journalists’ annual gala in New York. There, we honoured our Gaza colleagues, fallen journalists, more than 250 of them killed by the Israeli military. International journalists are banned from entering Gaza unless picked by the IDF and forced to work alongside them. In which case, they are not allowed to speak to Palestinians and are given a curated tour of what the Israeli army wishes them to see. We are also banned from bearing witness first hand.

Meanwhile, there are the living: the relatives of the 70,000 who cannot mourn because they are too busy trying to stay alive; the 19,000 Gazan orphans; the students who have not attended classes in three years; the amputees; the displaced – five or six times over in some cases – and the silent psychological terror of enduring life under bombardment.

The suffering of Palestinians has become an abstraction. We must restore the weight of human loss and awaken from whatever compassion fatigue we may feel.

Holocaust survivor Primo Levi once wrote about how difficult it is to destroy a person: “A long patience, and a sequence of small humiliations, are required.” It echoes the systematic killing, how dignity is chipped away, bit by bit with every life that is taken.

The 70,000 dead should act as a grave warning. This is not only about how fragile Palestinian lives are – but a question of our own moral order. We read of fatalities on such a massive scale, and it has so little global consequence. We allow those that are meant to stop it – journalists and the courts – to be silenced and face sanctions. This leaves us with a dangerous and menacing world.

There must be a reckoning for Gaza. The dead can no longer speak but we owe it to the 70,000 people to continue to speak out against Israel’s policies in Gaza and the West Bank. To restore dignity and return to the global order and the human rights framework. Or else these fragile human lives will forever remain nothing but statistics.