As human rights groups continue to call out war crimes committed by the Israeli military, we speak to the only U.S. diplomat to publicly resign from the Biden administration over its policy on Israel.
We first spoke to Hala Rharrit when she resigned from the State Department in April, citing the illegal and deceptive nature of U.S. policy in the Middle East. “We continue to willfully violate laws so that we surge U.S. military assistance to Israel,” she says after more than a year of Israel’s war on Gaza.
Rharrit says she found the Biden administration unmovable in its “counterproductive policy,” which she believes has gravely harmed U.S. interests in the Middle East. “We are going to feel the repercussions of that for years, decades, generations.”
There is 50-100 deaths a day that are recorded. Thanks to Israels deliberate destruction of the health system, fire fighters, journalists and other civilian infrastructure there is many more unrecorded deaths. And this is just people “missing”. On top there is all the indirect deaths that already occured or are inevitable from the total annihilation of infrastructure. The conservative estimates range from 200.000-300.000 people killed in Gaza. That is 10-15% of the total population.
I agree that there would be unrecorded deaths, but I don’t think Hamas has any reason to underestimate their number by a factor of five (5). There’s still a lot of structure and quite a large (international) presence of aid and medical workers, and journalists. One can use numbers from food distribution or the polio vaccinations that would easily corroborate 10% ‘missing’ population.