2023-10-31 06:50:42
The death toll from the Israeli Army’s bombings against the Gaza Strip following the October 7 attacks by Hamas continues to rise. The spokesman for the Gaza Ministry of Health, Ashraf al Qidra, encrypted them exactly in 8.306of which 3,457 would be children, and raised more than 21,000 the number of injured. And he added: “A large number of martyrs are still under the rubble of the buildings destroyed by Israel in its air attacks,” according to the Palestinian newspaper ‘Filastin’, linked to the aforementioned terrorist organization.
The Palestinian authorities denounced that “occupation forces have carried out 908 massacres in the Gaza Strip”, while calling on the international community to “protect medical facilities”, after Israeli attacks have left them out of service 25 hospitals in the enclave. “We ask Gaza residents to go to hospitals to donate blood, in the absence of a sufficient amount to save the injured,” they added.
As reported also Europa Press, the Palestinian Authority has said that more than one hundred Palestinians have died at the hands of the Israeli Army or in attacks by settlers since October 7. In this sense, the Jewish state has insisted on the idea that Hamas still has in its possession 229 hostages, kidnapped during the massacre at the Nova Festival, near Kibbutz Reim, where killed 1,400 Israelis and wounded 5,000. There is no doubt that the carnage caused by this latest conflict in the Middle East is historic.
“Hamas has made a mistake of historic proportions,” declared Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and it appears that the threats are being carried out. Are we, however, talking about the deadliest war between Israel and Palestine since hostilities between them began in 1948? Since that year in which the Jewish State was created, there have been several escalations of violence or conflicts that have occurred between both peoples, which have also produced hundreds of thousands of injured and displaced people. Let’s compare the figures of all the episodes compared to the current one.
Arab-Israeli War of 1948
What was known by Israel as the War of Independence or War of Liberation was the first of a series of armed conflicts between the Israeli State and its Arab neighbors. The United Nations had agreed to the partition of the British Mandate of Palestine into two states: one Jewish, with 55% percent of the territory, and another Arab, with the rest of the territory except the surrounding area of Jerusalem and Bethlehem, which would be considered a internationalized zone. This resolution was accepted by the Jewish leaders, but rejected by the Zionist paramilitary organizations and by the Arabs as a whole.
This mandate expired on May 15, 1948 and, as soon as the British withdrew from the region, Egyptian, Iraqi, Lebanese, Syrian and Transjordanian troops, supported by Libyan, Saudi and Yemeni volunteers, began the invasion of the newly proclaimed Jewish state. The war lasted a year and two months, until July 20, 1949, and gave Israel the victory. Thanks to this, the Jews increased their territory by about 23% more than what was initially allocated (almost 6,000 square kilometers), while the Gaza Strip and the West Bank were occupied by Egypt and Transjordan respectively.
It is estimated that Israel lost about 1% of its total population during the attacks: 6.373 personas. Of them, 4,000 were soldiers and the rest civilians. As far as the Arab world is concerned, the number of deaths was never fully clarified, but it is estimated that they could have been between 10,000 and 15,000. Of special significance was the massacre in the village of Deir Yassin, in which between 107 and 120 Palestinian civilians died in just two days.
War of the six days
During this conflict, which occurred between June 5 and 10, 1967, Israel wrested control of Gaza from Egypt and occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem, areas that remain under its control. He did so through an operation that, called Focus, determined the fate of the conflict as soon as it began. It consisted of a devastating raid against the Egyptian aviation, so aggressive that only 12 airplanes remained in the Hebrew country to defend it, while 183 were launched against the objectives.
Jewish fighters and bombers destroyed seven out of ten Egyptian aircraft, most of them on the ground. They thus deprived the Muslim troops of crucial support. In less than a week, Israel prevailed over a coalition of several Arab countries supported by others. It is estimated that twenty Muslim soldiers died for every Jewish casualty. Not counting the disappearance of 70% of the Islamic war machinery, that is, more than 800 tanks and about 400 airplanes.
The figures for the current war, therefore, are already equal to those of 1967, although it is longer than that of 1967. In those six days, 777 Jews died and 2,563 were injured, in addition to 15 prisoners. On the Egyptian side, the deceased were between 9,800 and 15,000to which we should add 45,000 injured and 4,338 prisoners. On this same side, 700 Jordanians also died, 2,500 wounded and 533 prisoners.
The Intifadas
The data collected by B’Tseleman Israeli NGO, give a good account of the asymmetry of this historic confrontation that, since December 1987, just after the beginning of the First Intifada, and until September of this same year, 87% of the fatalities related to the conflict (a total of 13,400) are of Palestinian origin. The large spikes in violence and deaths in these last four decades are only double those that have occurred since the aforementioned attack on October 7 alone.
The bloodiest years of this last stage were those that coincide with the Second Intifada, between 2000 and 2005, which left a balance of 2,664 Palestinians and 961 Israelis dead. The worst year was 2002, with 1,034 Palestinian deaths compared to 419 Israelis. The number of victims has also been significant in the four smaller wars that have occurred since then – between 2008 and 2009 and in 2012, 2014 and 2021 –, although they did not reach these extremes, despite the fact that the Strip Gaza was isolated and subject to a fierce military blockade during this time, which included bombings and power cuts in the territory.
Since that first year, of the 6,400 Palestinians who have died As a direct consequence of the hostilities, 84% are concentrated in the Gaza Strip, according to UN data. Of that total, more than half are civilians, including hundreds of children and the elderly, according to reports ‘The World Order’. “The gigantic gap in the correlation of forces is even more dramatic if we consider the number of injuries that have been recorded since 2008: of the total of 158,000 affected, more than 152,000 are of Palestinian origin,” this website highlights.
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