(Blogging on the Gaza War since January 14th. Please link them on to others.)

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then I shouldn’t have much more work to do this week. I started with the very good public website of Kevin Drum, who presented the first graph in the top half of the picture (panel a). Based on data from the (Hamas-run) Gaza Health Ministry via the UN, it displays the daily deaths (red dots) of Gazans from October 7 to February 19, with a linear function (dotted black line) fitted to the daily data. This function declines from between 300-400 in October to 100 in February.

The lower part of the figure (panel b, my responsibility alone) is my attempt to extend Drum’s excellent graph from February to today. The daily deaths (also from the Gaza Health Ministry via the UN) are shown as blue dots, with the red line representing the 7-day moving average. Please note that the two graphs are on very different scales. The Drum graph covers 85 days, my extension 47, so the horizontal axis is much more spread out. More importantly, the vertical axis is expanded 7-fold. Thus, except for three high daily values (the first reflecting the tragic stampede of an aid truck), every value on the lower graph is below the lowest value on the upper graph, and the values are declining over time as they are in the upper graph starting from much higher values. The curved blue arrows are my attempt to make it easier to imagine what the two graphs would look like side by side if this screen were much wider than it is.

Note that even in the top graph by Kevin Drum, daily deaths in February were fewer than one third of those in October; my extension-graph below shows that in the late-March April period daily deaths were about a quarter of those in October. Another way to look at this is to note that of the 33,091 deaths between October 7 and April 5, 17,777 had occurred by December 7. By February 7, 27,708 deaths were recorded, or an additional 10,000. Thus in the first two months of the war there were almost 18 thousand deaths, in the second two months 10,000, and in the third two months 5,400.

Remember, all these data come from the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry.

The main reason for this steep decline is that what US and UK military experts recognize as the world’s most careful and professional army was at first facing a totally unprecedented type of war, combining one of the densest urban-warfare situations in history with an enemy completely ensconced behind and under civilians, including in a vast underground city of fortresses, weapons depots, military headquarters, dwellings, jails, and connecting tunnels. The way to fight this war was not immediately apparent to any military experts in the world, but an army as fiercely determined to minimize civilian deaths as to win victory figured it out day by day, week by week, and month by month. How they did it is already being studied at West Point, Sandhurst, and other elite military academies throughout the world.

On March 22, the day when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) took to the House floor to accuse Israel of committing “unfolding genocide,” average daily deaths had declined more than two thirds from the early part of the war, and have continued to decline further in the two weeks since. Far from back-pedaling, she repeated this grotesque blood-libel against the Jews not once but several times on Jake Tapper’s Sunday show, and doubled down further by saying that Israel had “crossed the threshold of intent” in mass starvation of the Gazan people, “half of whom are children.”

Because the esteemed Congresswoman cannot trouble herself to look up the meaning of the word “genocide;” does not bother to look at the easily available data shown above; and has also ignored the tremendous and dangerous lengths the Israeli people’s army has had to go to to produce the declines shown here, I conclude that she is a fool (unlikely), a charlatan (probably not), or—by a process of elimination—a fanatic and an anti-Semite.

She alluded on both occasions to widespread starvation and impending famine. Bear in mind that the daily death numbers above are entirely sourced from the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, and their recent numbers are far too low to remotely support the claim of widespread deaths from hunger. But that’s not all. On April 1 that same Hamas-run Health Ministry stated that there had been 28 deaths from starvation; that’s right. Twenty-eight. Not 28 on April 1 but 28 up to that day. So the Congresswoman piled one blood libel against the Jews on top of another, joining the chorus of antisemitic voices charging Israel with trying to starve the whole Gazan population to death.

Around 9 million people worldwide die from hunger every year.

Yes, there is widespread hunger in Gaza and there is some starvation in the north. Israel could and should have done more to avert this suffering. But now there are air drops by five different countries, huge cargo ships coming from Cyprus to a new pier under construction near the Gaza shore, and Israel continuing to pass on at least a hundred trucks a day of food, with more to come overland from Jordan through at least one new gate that Israel is opening in the same spot that terrorists poured through to do their atrocities. Just today it was announced that the Israeli port of Ashdod will open to aid for Gaza, despite yet another barrage of rockets fired against this civilian city from Gaza on March 25^th.

More will be needed to solve the hunger problem in Gaza, but multiple solutions are under way, and it is certain that famine will not materialize. I will return next time to detail a different barrage, the stunning onslaught of exaggerations, lies, and libels we have heard from once-but-no-longer-trusted sources determined to become, like the Congresswoman from Queens, Hamas pawns in a relentless war of words against Israel. All of them refuse to acknowledge the huge number of trucks that were hijacked by Hamas and rogue gunmen—many video-documented—the true perpetrators of Gazan starvation. (To help, give meals to Gazans through the World Central Kitchen‘s Ramadan Relief program. This food goes to hungry Gazans.)

Meanwhile  we have passed the fourth Friday of Ramadan, known as Al-Quds or Jerusalem Day, and often in the past an occasion for vigorous, even violent protests. This Al-Quds Friday passed as the photo below shows, with 120,000 ascending the Temple Mount (the Noble Sanctuary for Muslims) to worship God in their own way, and only a tiny handful making trouble. Except in Iran, protests around the world were peaceful. Ramadan will end on Tuesday at sunset when the final day’s fast culminates in the month’s and one of the year’s greatest feasts, Eid-al-Fitr. I wish my Muslim friends an Eid-al-Fitr Mubarak, a blessed, joyous and spiritually rewarding celebration.

Thousands of peaceful worshipers on the Temple Mount (Noble Sanctuary), Fourth Friday of Ramadan, April 5, 2024