In the sun-bleached, rubble-strewn moonscape of Gaza, the number of the dead has become the central battleground of a war fought with bombs and arithmetic fraught with lies.
After Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel to discuss the war in Gaza, he cast doubt on the chances of negotiating a surrender of the militant group Hamas, saying that a diplomatic deal to end the war might not be possible.
“It’s obvious that Israel has no better ally than America,” Netanyahu said. “The American-Israeli alliance has never been as strong as it is now.”
This appears to suggest that President Donald Trump is satisfied with Netanyahu’s final solution to the Palestinian problem, even as most Americans deplore the level of violence there inflicted with US weapons.
A Gallup poll released in July 2025 found that only 32% of Americans approve of Israel’s military action in Gaza, a new low. In contrast, disapproval reached 60%.
A major factor in the shift is the growing disapproval among independents, and only 8% of Democrats approved of Israel’s actions, a significant drop from November 2023.
In the same poll, 71% of Republicans expressed approval, a position embraced by Senator Cory Booker and Congressman Josh Gottheimer.
The shift in American sympathy toward Palestinians is largely attributed to the images and reports of the humanitarian situation coming out of Gaza, where the official death tally, a grotesque and mounting ledger of names, stands at over 64,000 souls extinguished, but that number, a horror in itself, is a phantom.
This statistical ghost haunts the periphery of a much darker truth. For in the shadows of the collapsed hospitals and the silent, starving children, a far more terrifying figure looms—a projection of ultimate cost that reaches toward 600,000.
This is not a discrepancy born of simple error.
This is a chasm of accountability, a canyon deliberately carved between those killed by the direct, shattering impact of a bomb and those executed slowly, insidiously, by the calculated destruction of everything that sustains human life. The first number is a body count. The second is a prophecy of genocide that has been fulfilled.
And into this void of veracity steps a voice accustomed to speaking truth to corrupt power, human rights attorney Steven Donziger.
Donziger, a renowned environmental lawyer who has seen firsthand how states and corporations manufacture their own realities, has done the math that governments fear.
His calculations, extrapolated from the grim science of conflict mortality published in journals like The Lancet, paint a picture of such profound carnage that it defies the imagination.
Donziger estimates that the true toll, when accounting for the silent slaughter from starvation, from cholera festering in contaminated water, from injuries left to fester without medicine, is not in the tens of thousands, but in the hundreds of thousands. Half a million civilians. Perhaps more.
Donziger’s is not a voice from the fringe, but a sober opinion that made an indictment based on the cold, hard fact that in modern siege warfare, for every person blown apart, four more will die from the aftermath.
This is not speculation; it is a historical certainty that Israel’s military strategists understand all too well.
They have weaponized not just their arsenal, but the very basics of survival. Donziger has called this what it is: an undeniable war crime of biblical proportions, a scale of loss that, if applied to the United States, would equate to tens of millions of Americans vanished from the earth.
Yet, from the Israeli government, we are offered a carnival of shifting numbers and cynical obfuscation.
The IDF’s public estimates of Hamas fighters killed bounce like a rubber ball, from 12,000 to 17,000 and back again, a performance of such staggering incompetence that it can only be deliberate.
Prime Minister Netanyahu himself stands at the podium and asserts, with a straight face, a clean, sanitized ratio of 14,000 militants to 16,000 civilians—a claim so laughably at odds with reality it would be satire if the topic were not mass death.
But the mask slips.
A leaked internal IDF database, a glimpse into the cold, hard intelligence they never intended for us to see, tells a different story. It confesses that a mere 16.8 percent of the dead were militants.
The math is simple, and it is damning: five out of every six people killed were civilians. And even this, a source within the system admits, is manipulated.
“People are promoted to the rank of terrorist after their death,” the source said—a posthumous slander to pad the numbers and launder a massacre.
The World Health Organization, the United Nations, and independent studies in the world’s most respected medical journals have consistently affirmed that the Gaza Health Ministry’s counts, while tragic, are the most reliable data we have.
They are, if anything, an undercount. The nature of this violence—with thousands buried under the rubble of their own homes, entire bloodlines erased—means the final, verified number of direct casualties will never be known.
Donziger’s is the number that accounts for the infant who died of dehydration in her mother’s arms, the grandfather who succumbed to an infected wound in a street turned into a clinic, the families starved into nothingness by a siege designed to kill long after the bombs have fallen silent. It is the final, awful truth of this operation.
The official numbers are a bureaucratic fiction. The real count is measured in the silence of a generation that is no longer there.
And the arithmetic of the dead does not forgive.
Amid rising tensions across the Middle East, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a September 12 text endorsing a landmark declaration calling for an independent State of Palestine, while Israel’s delegate rejected it as a “carefully staged performance for headlines.” The measure was adopted by a recorded vote of 142 in favor to 10 against, with 12 abstentions.
Against the resolution were Argentina, Hungary, Israel, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Tonga, and the United States. The American representative described the text as “a misguided, ill-timed publicity stunt” that undermines serious diplomatic efforts as well as a “gift to Hamas.”
Netanyahu has repeatedly and forcefully rejected a two-state solution, despite growing international pressure for Palestinian statehood.
But the specter of 600,000 dead is a number that hints at when Netanyahu declared that there would be no Palestinian state, he intends that there will be no Palestinian people.