Israel’s Campaign in Gaza Is Structured to Maximize Human Suffering

This yields a projection of roughly 680,000 Palestinian deaths in Gaza, with a staggering 380,000 being children under the age of five, showing Israel’s systematic attack on life itself. The obstruction of food, medicine, and humanitarian aid, when coupled with mass civilian death, fit within the legal categories of extermination and collective punishment. The International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court increasingly rely on mortality data in order to establish scope and intent, meaning that the way in which deaths are counted becomes central to legal arguments. In this light, the struggle over how to count Gaza’s dead is inseparable from the struggle for justice itself. 

In a report published in Hebrew by Haaretz, and translated by author Jasper Nathaniel, Israeli soldiers confess to a wave of crimes against humanity, with some admitting that orders were given to target civilian infrastructure and treat every Palestinian as a potential combatant. Testimonies describe systematic practices including the destruction of residential blocks, direct obstruction of medical evacuations, and the deliberate denial of food and water. Several soldiers openly admit that their aim wasn’t only military victory, but the production of unlivable conditions; this objective, when read alongside the mortality data, lends further weight to the argument that famine and infrastructural collapse are not incidental by-products of war, but deliberate Israeli policy.

Most chillingly, some accounts include admissions of killing children: “We enter the area…and start spraying, firing hundreds of bullets. Then we charged forward, and then I realized that it was a mistake.’ There was no terrorist there. ‘I saw two bodies of children, maybe eight years old, maybe ten’… the company commander arrived and said coldly, as if he wasn’t human, ‘They entered the extermination area, it’s their fault, that’s how it is in war.’” When placed against the backdrop of Hil and Polya’s mortality estimates, these confessions reveal a pattern of dehumanization among IDF soldiers, of all ranks, a convergence which confirms that Israel’s campaign in Gaza is structured to maximize human suffering through direct violence and long-term deprivation. 

Numbers have come to shape not only humanitarian responses but also the evidentiary basis for accountability. Even the slightest efforts at minimization allow for perpetrators to deny responsibility and forestall intervention, whereas comprehensive accounting renders visible the full scale of destruction. Hil and Polya’s report emphasizes that behind every disputed figure lies a moral calculus: whether international law will continue to treat Gaza as the site of two equal aggressors, with Israel simply committing unintended ‘mistakes,’ or the locus of crimes against humanity on a scale unseen in recent years. To take full measure of Gaza’s dead is to commit oneself to historical truth and to the interrogation of the moral limits of warfare; thereby, to undercount is to further legitimize the full spectrum of violence, by whatever means this violence is unleashed. How Gaza’s dead are counted will shape not only the historical record of this genocide, but also the prospects for accountability in intentional courts and, ultimately, the ability of law to restraint state violence.