Explaining the Numbers in Gaza

Photo by Mohammed Ibrahim on Unsplash

I believe well over a million Gazans have already perished due to US and Israeli bombs and forced starvation, and that fewer than 100,000 have emigrated. Those Gazans remaining upright – on the 30% of the Strip left to them – are being starved, bombed, burned, and harassed every day as a matter of Israeli policy.

Because the US government and state media supports genocide in Gaza, accurate data is hard to find. Genocide, murder, starvation of an occupied people, and territorial and resource theft are all crimes of the state. If you murder your neighbors, starve your children, and move into your neighbor’s property and empty their checking account, you will – in every place on earth – be promptly punished, defanged, disarmed, and possibly hung. These niceties do not apply to states, and Murray Rothbard was accurate when he noted, “The state is a gang of thieves writ large, the most immoral, grasping and unscrupulous individuals in any society.”

Gazans – now clustered within the 42 square miles remaining to them – are surveilled, shot, bombed, and forced to arbitrarily relocate here and there as the IDF detonates already bombed-out buildings. Gaza is today geographically half the size of Caribou, Maine or Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Two years ago, Gaza was recognized at 125 square miles, had several mid-sized Mediterranean cities, 2.3 million people and an agricultural and manufacturing economy, that despite Israeli micro-management and macro-aggression, provided food and goods for local and international markets. Today, no functional cities remain, the people are being starved to death, and I believe fewer than a million Gazans have survived the past two and a half years. From decades of mowing the grass in Gaza, Israel now bulldozes the corpses, hoping to ensure no life – or record of life – exists there.

A million Gazan corpses are denied by most sources, who carefully offer their own much lower numbers. In part, this understatement serves to manage domestic criticism in the West. Many Western governments agree with Israel, and hope to wake up soon to an emptied and bulldozed Gaza, so that the newly indemnified Trumpian Board of Peace can build centrally designed cities and resorts in Gaza, sans Gazans. A new US military base there is already in work. There is also a reluctance to over-estimate the number of dead, as this could somehow, in the future, miraculously make Israel look more humane.

A higher estimate of dead souls is warranted, considering the calorie crisis, the physical destruction of the necessities of life and survival, and comparable natural disasters. This argument would be unnecessary if we simply believed what the Israeli government and 80% of Israelis say about their intentions in Gaza, and elsewhere. Erasure, no survivors, annihilation. Even the children sing about it.

Point 1. State-Induced Famine

Famine was officially confirmed last August, almost a year ago. Israel was criticized for denying aid into Gaza; in October, Israel further destroyed food and humanitarian aid avenues for Gazans. The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute published an important study last month entitled “Data for Denial: The Smokescreen Behind the Starvation of Gaza. A Grok translation of the document from Hebrew may be found here, and even Grok seemed reluctant to read it.

Israeli officials demanding their government starve the Gazans to death share the stage with reports of over $45 million spent by US and Israeli taxpayers for Israeli hasbara to deny any starvation was occurring at all in Gaza.

UN-monitored aid into Gaza, under the UN 2720 Mechanism for Gaza, shows that in 2026, through June 28^th, around 174,000 tons of food arrived at its destination in Gaza. On a per-day basis, covering the food aid coming in from a variety of charities and UN organizations, including WFP and World Central Kitchen, it amounts to less than a thousand tons of food a day so far this year. Earlier, in the last quarter of 2025, 125,000 tons was delivered, just over a thousand tons per day. A thousand tons of food for 2.1 million people, assuming it is all delivered, to all the people, in a usable form, with potable water to mix the dry milk and to cook. This amounts to 15 ounces of food (flour, dry goods, powdered milk, oils) per person per day.

Red Crescent, operating from Egypt, Turkey and elsewhere, also delivers food to Gaza. Prior to the decimation of Gaza’s greenhouses and olive groves, poisoning of land and water, and destruction of water delivery systems, Gaza had a vibrant indigenous food supply. For the last 31 years, Israel has retained its status as the occupying power in Gaza, but it doesn’t provide food. Instead it subcontracts its legal duties, for the provision of food and medical supplies, to humanitarian entities funded by third-party states and international institutions. These food and aid deliveries are then admitted in full, in part, delayed or completely denied by Israel at militarized Gaza points of entry.

Israeli military and state bureaucrats calculate “required” calories per person in Gaza, with pre-identified mechanisms to use starvation as both collective punishment and a tool of war. In these calculations, locally produced food was quantified, and its nutritional equivalent deducted from these calculations. This calculated limit is implemented, as it has been for decades, by the Israeli enforced food and trade denials.

Israeli bureaucrats know food needs per person, by age and gender, and they have the best information on how many calories and nutrients are coming into the country. They know how much is destroyed by IDF-protected settler gangs, how much is stolen by Israeli paid gangs inside Gaza, and they know how much is sitting, inside and outside the checkpoints, due to rejection at the border or the fact that the IDF had purposely bombed storage and distribution centers. The military state of Israel considers spoiled, degraded, dumped, undistributed food in bombed-out facilities to be eaten by rodents or insects as a plus, maybe worthy of a promotion of two. The numbers of surviving Gazans and the actual calories they are consuming may be the most closely held secret of the Israeli government today.

Without a doubt no one is feeding 2.1 million Gazans. Outside of the occupying army, the number of people getting adequate food in Gaza today may be zero.

Point 2: Erasure through State-Administered Massacre

Siege and starvation warfare against a captured domestic population by an occupying power, while illegal and immoral, is met with general indifference by Israel’s major allies, specifically the US. Much as Western industrialists and centralist politicians like FDR admired (and helped fund) Hitler’s fascist state-directed industry, many in the West admire Israel’s ethno-fascism, lawless sovereignty, and fluid borders. Beyond starving them to death, Israel has conducted a one-sided war against the population, and the physical destruction of Gaza comes with clear and plentiful before-and-after images and reports that have resulted in, not truth and accountability, but at least a global rise in contempt for the Zionist State itself.

Gaza has been, from the beginning, a project, and a target, of Israeli totalitarianism. The State of Israel has not just overseen management of the Gaza economy and politics, it has directly controlled it by denying free trade, demanding subordination of the people and the economy, confiscating Gazan export earnings and taxes, and spending millions of US dollars and shekels to create political division, for example, by Netanyahu’s decades of funding Hamas. Administration of trade controls, import controls, confiscation, and political manipulation requires reams of data and formulas, and it is administered entirely by force. Gaza exists as a [mis]planned society that Israel fears and seeks to destroy; as expected, the grand designs of states with limited understanding and information fail miserably. Beyond simple imperialism, Israel lives and breathes Hayek’s fatal conceit, the state’s pretense of knowledge; it is the dictionary definition of the bureaucratic mindset described by Mises.

The state is by definition force, and its force can be measured in kinetic energy. We know Gaza consisted of 90,000 acres on October 7^th, 2023, with 40,000 IDF targets hit in the first year alone, and the equivalent of 100,000 tons of TNT delivered as of January 2025, 15 months into the war. This is a window that excludes the entirety of bombing that took place in 2025, and that which has continued throughout the “cease-fire” that of October 2025. We may assume the targets were largely in urban Gaza, where eight of her largest cities contained over 1.1 million people before the genocide; with many more people forced into to these cities by desperation and Israeli design. The targets included tunnels, of course, as well as factories, water works, schools, housing and hospitals. If we assume 25% of the land mass held 75% of the targets, we are left with 1.3 targets per acre; 75% of the TNT equivalent associated with those targets is 3.2 tons per acre. A ton of TNT is about 21 cubic feet, the size of large refrigerator. We may conservatively calculate that three refrigerator-size pallets of TNT per acre had already been ignited and exploded as of January 2025. If you live in a nice suburban neighborhood in the US, on quarter acre lots, it is as if all three of your neighbors on that acre of paradise blew up a refrigerator size quantity of TNT somewhere on their property.

Describing the assault on Gaza in terms of TNT equivalent per acre can explain how the many before and after photos of Gaza were made possible. Other calculations equate the kinetic energy deployed against Gaza to be six, or even eight, Hiroshima-sized bombs. In an American suburb, we may live at a density of 30 people per acre; in mid-rise apartment buildings, we live at a density of 450 people per acre. Would 3.2 tons of TNT equivalent, impacting 450 people – 14 pounds of TNT per person, over 40 pounds per family – be problematic for survival?

Here’s what it did. As of October 2025, nearly 200,000 buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. 123,000 of these have been completely destroyed. 436,000 of all Gaza housing units – 92% of all housing – have been destroyed. 50 million tons of debris is on the ground. If only one person died instantly or slowly under the rubble for every home or apartment that was destroyed by Israel, we would have 436,000 direct deaths.

We have an instructive example from the 20^th century. Allied forces in WWII dropped 8,000 tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs on the German city of Dresden over a period of 18 months. At the time, Dresden held about 600,000 people. In just two days in February, 1945, over 3,900 tons killed 25,000 people, almost entirely women and children. Weapons used in Gaza by the IDF are far more sophisticated and varied than those used in World War II, and more damage can be done by destroying key buildings and facilities with far less “tonnage” that we might have used in the 1940s. But if 3,900 tons of incendiary and high explosive bombs could kill 25,000 people who had no place to go, how many Gazans would be killed by the use of 75,000 tons or even 100,000 tons dropped on their urban areas? Projecting these statistics would suggest that easily 480,000 Gazan direct deaths.

These estimates do not count thousands killed by IDF snipers and drones, and the well-practiced IDF strategy of the double tap.

Point 3: Indirect Destruction of Life and Community

If decades-long starvation policies, and direct destruction of life and habitat are not enough to end Gazan life, we can also estimate the indirect deaths in Gaza. Deprivation of food causes a higher death rate. Bombing and shooting and failing to rescue people under mountains of rubble – wounding them, amputating limbs, and causing brain and spinal injuries – leads to death days and weeks later, especially in the absence of clean water, food, and medical care or a surviving family. Israeli policy on Gaza coordinates direct destruction of life with a simultaneous war on the factors that save lives and preserve the will to live. Thus, Israel has targeted and killed more journalists in Gaza, more doctors, more paramedics, more children, more women, and more teenagers than any previous example, surpassing even Pol Pot between 1975 and 1979 who oversaw the elimination of 25% of the Khmer population. In those four years, 82% of the violent deaths in Cambodia were men; no one kills women and children like Israel. Israel also prevents search and rescue operations, and targets those attempting to help others or rebuild. As the IDF expands westward to the sea, they bulldoze Gazan cemeteries and everything else.

Palantir has assisted in targeting families, especially those descending from the land-owning Gazans there prior to the 1948 Nakba, and the subsequent use of Gaza for forcibly displaced Palestinians. Government offices, holding Gazan land titles and family records were early targets for destruction. Schools, universities and hospitals – also places where records of human existence, where family names and property addresses might be preserved – were targeted. Energy, fuel, water and sewage systems were targeted. A war on women in particular, as a war on preservation of family and reproduction, on culture, was and is mirrored by the Israel war on food, shelter and fuel, the murder of children and IDF efforts to poison both land and water. This category of Israeli war conduct was not developed just for Gaza; the same tactics are institutionalized in the West Bank and southern Lebanon as well.

In the United States, we sue the Bayer Corporation for not warning users of the danger of using glyphosate and the impact of this herbicide on non-target plant and animal species. For Israel, glyphosate at abnormally high concentrations is a useful weapon of the war on food, land and life. The German Bayer, like the American Monsanto before it, is happy to oblige. No one will sue.

Direct and indirect death estimates from last year – suggesting 680,000 perished by an Australian research team – were criticized by Israel, the US and the UK. Last fall, MSF (Doctors Without Borders) explained how a million would die in Gaza City, and why. Israel’s own public references to numbers of Gazans has been dropping from 2.3 million at the start of this most recent genocide and land grab to 2.1 (commonly accepted in the West today) to Trump’s mention of 1.7 million Gazans he wishes to relocate elsewhere. This forced relocation scheme for Gaza has been renamed the “Free Movement Plan.” Israeli media have mentioned numbers as low as 1.4 million Gazans still upright, encouraging numbers as the genocide is approaching – in the spirit of Orwell, with just a touch of Nietzsche – “Free Movement.”

Incidentally, two recent items in the news seem intended to produce sympathy or respect for the Israeli government. One cannot be sure if they are part of an organized Hasbara effort, or just hypocritical jokes. This week, Israel formally recognized the Turkish genocide in Armenia, where up to 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey were killed during the first world war. The US and many other countries recognize this genocide, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Pakistan do not. After more than a century, it remains a galvanizing issue for the region, and remains fresh in national and international memory, in part because its survivors had a state of their own.

It is clear the Israeli genocide in Gaza is one of erasure, intending no survivors, intending no Palestinian state within which Gazans could regroup, and remember.

Also this week, the Israeli government sent IDF units to Venezuela to for search and rescue operations in the aftermath of last week’s earthquakes. One might assume that the IDF has some experience, given the massive scale of rescue operations needed for women and children throughout Gazan cities, where the smell of decomposing bodies persists long after the buildings have crumbled. Instead, the IDF shoots people attempting to rescue the injured and trapped, under apartment buildings toppled by their man-made earthquake of bombs. One might assume that the IDF has familiarity with stray dogs and cats eating the dead, and stopping it. Instead, IDF soldiers take videos of dogs and cats eating the corpses to share with their friends for fun. The Times of Israel reports, unabashedly and without embarrassment, the IDF will share “the knowledge and experience the State of Israel has gained in dealing with earthquakes, emergency situations, and aid missions around the world.”

Estimates of the death toll of twin earthquakes on June 24^th range from 1,000 to 100,000, with damage or total destruction recorded for 58,870 buildings, and active rescue operations still finding trapped survivors in the rubble. Rescue operations are supported by many countries and agencies, and are welcomed, rather than shot at. Aid is expedited into affected cities, not rejected at the border. One major geological event, on a single day, with active support for search and rescue and aid to victims, and yet thousands of lives may still have been lost, and billions of dollars will be needed to rebuild. There is no excuse for under-estimating the death toll in Gaza after nearly three years of active decimation, obstruction, and inhumanity by the US and Israel.

Conclusion

Israel’s war to end humanity in Gaza will ultimately prove counterproductive. Ideas are bulletproof, courage is contagious, and karma is real. Humanity – while its stated enemy consists of global elites, Alex Karp, and dangerous cults like Zionism – has a deep tap root, and will survive and grow even under the worst conditions. Israel, having launched a genocide, cannot reverse course. The witnesses must be killed, and the witnesses are being killed. The United States government is enabling, fueling and encouraging Israel in its flawed approach to national security, as it has done for decades.

It is challenging to criticize the state heartily enough for its native overbearance, insanity, bold theft, organized murder, lack of humility and evil ambition. When the state nakedly exposes itself in all of this and more – as both the US government and Israelis are excitedly doing in Gaza – there can be no limit to our expectations of continued disaster and continued criminality.

It is time to choose a side, and it is long past time to become an enemy of the state.