[Salon] Israel revises down toll from October 7 attack to 'around 1, 200

FM: John Whitbeck

While Joe Biden has contemptuously and contemptably questioned the Gaza Ministry of Health's count of Palestinians killed by Israeli bombardments, I am not aware of a single instance in which Western politicians or media (even AL JAZEERA!) have questioned or even qualified the precise figure of 1405 which has been cited by the Israeli authorities for the past month as the number of people killed on October 7 on the Israeli side of the border, opting instead to cite that number as an indisputable fact, subject only, in some instances, to gratuitously adding the words "at least".

As reported in the AL JAZEERA news item at the link transmitted below, the Israeli authorities have now, extraordinarily, reduced their figure to "around 1,200".

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/10/israel-revises-death-toll-from-october-7-hamas-attack-to-1200-people

On November 2, when considering the then still substantial gap between the 1405 figure and the continuously updated listing of those killed maintained by HAARETZ (as of today, 1165), I wrote: "It is, of course, possible that, if the 1405 figure were arrived at by counting bodies, as is the case for the Gaza figures, numerous counted bodies, still unidentified, were those of Palestinian fighters, who were no more distinctively dressed than Israeli civilians."

The Israeli authorities have now admitted that this was in fact the case.

Explicitly included among the 1165 killed who have been identified by the HAARETZ listing are 356 soldiers, the initial -- and legally legitimate -- targets of the Hamas attack. This brings the number of identified civilians killed to around 800. It is also now known that not all of these 800 were Israelis (notably including many Asian farm workers) and that, according to Israeli sources, a significant proportion of those officially claimed to have been killed by Hamas fighters were in fact recklessly killed by the indiscriminate but not unintentional "friendly fire" of Israeli military forces applying the famous better-dead-than-a-hostage "Hannibal Directive" (https://thegrayzone.com/2023/10/27/israels-military-shelled-burning-tanks-helicopters).

While a precise figure for the number of Israeli civilians actually killed by Hamas fighters and armed freelancers who rushed through the breaches in the Gaza prison fence to strike a blow against their tormentors and die will never be known, it would not be unreasonable to suggest that the number may be in the range of 500-600, a number equivalent to roughly 1/20th of the number of Palestinian civilians killed by Israel in its genocidal revenge attacks so far.

CONTEXT MATTERS:

It is true that, in the context of the Jewish experience since the Second World War, the October 7 events constituted the greatest number of Jews killed in a single day since the Holocaust and were indeed horrific and "unprecedented".

However, it is also true that, in the context of the horrific Palestinian experience with the Zionist movement and the State of Israel over the past 100 years, it would not be unreasonable to view the October 7 events, while unquestionably ugly if viewed out of context as a stand-alone, unprovoked attack, as a relatively modest riposte which does not come remotely close to balancing the injustice and brutality accounts between the occupiers and the occupied.

This context matters since the October 7 events are being exploited as an opportunity to excuse and justify a genocide and what appears to be a clear aspiration and intention to empty the Gaza Strip of its entire Palestinian population by making it literally unlivable.

A FINAL THOUGHT:

Both Bibi Netanyahu and Joe Biden like to compare the 10/7 events to the 9/11 events, even citing population multipliers to suggest that 10/7 was many times worse than 9/11. It is also being suggested that the shock and psychological trauma of realizing that anyone could do to them what they had repeatedly done to others with impunity explains why the U.S. government went berserk after 9/11 and the Israeli government has gone berserk since 10/7.

However, there are rational people who find it difficult to believe that either government was as blindly oblivious and incompetent as it has claimed to be in these instances and suspect that, on the contrary, they did not simply exploit these events opportunistically but consciously "let it happen" -- and, in some respects, actively facilitated its happening -- in order to be able to implement pre-existing violent programs of power projection for which they would not otherwise have enjoyed either domestic or international support.