[Salon] Gaza’s Real Death Toll: 680,000 Killed – 70% Are Children



https://thisisrobinaqureshi.substack.com/p/gazas-real-death-toll-680000-killed

Gaza’s Real Death Toll: 680,000 Killed – 70% Are Children

In their forensic article Skewering History: The Odious Politics of Counting Gaza’s Dead, Dr Richard Hil and Dr Gideon Polya dismantle the official narrative on Gaza’s death toll — and the numbers they present are shattering.

The authors show that when deaths from starvation, disease, and deprivation are included, the true toll by April 2025 was closer to 680,000 Palestinians killed — 12 to 14 times higher than what most outlets report.

The most devastating detail: around 380,000 of these deaths were infants under five, and 479,000 were children in total — meaning nearly 70% of Gaza’s dead are children.

Save the Children estimates that 20,000 more children remain buried under Gaza’s 51 million tons of rubble, their bodies unrecovered.

The authors note that the Palestinian-to-Israeli death ratio is now 597 to 1 — sixty times higher than Hitler’s infamous 10-to-1 massacre reprisals in Nazi-occupied Rome. This is not a “war” but an industrial-scale slaughter.

And the erasure is deliberate. Almost 250 Palestinian journalists have been killed. International press are banned from Gaza.

Al Jazeera has been banned from Israel, and independent media offices like Haaretz have been attacked — a systematic attempt to silence documentation of the genocide.

Words like “genocide,” “occupation,” and “ethnic cleansing” are banned from use in most Western state broadcasters.

The article also highlights Donald Trump’s own admission, in May 2025, citing intelligence figures that put Gaza’s remaining population at 1.7 million - meaning as many as 700,000 Gazans have been killed or disappeared.

Perhaps most chillingly, Hil and Polya report that a majority of Israelis support the mass expulsion of all Palestinians from Gaza.

A May 2025 poll found that a majority of Israelis support the forced removal of all Palestinians and 65% explicitly invoked the biblical command to “erase Amalek.”

Hil and Polya’s analysis makes clear what the euphemisms and media silences conceal: Gaza is living through one of the deadliest episodes of mass killing since World War II — and the vast majority of its victims are children.



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