“From the individualistic point of view it matters not at all that a million people perish, what matters is that one person dies a million times.”

—Lidiya Ginzburg (1902-90) siege of Leningrad survivor, “Notes from the Blockade”, p. 85

“I am not a number and I do not consent to my death being passing news. Say, too, that I love life, happiness, freedom, children’s laughter, the sea, coffee, writing, Fairouz, everything that is joyful—though these things will all disappear in the space of a moment.”

—Nour al Din Hajjaj, Palestinian writer (2006 -2023)

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Numbers can be a double-edged sword.

They can help us perceive the scale of an issue, or the difference between two things. We can use them to detect how patterns may change over time. They can aid us in finding associations between variables. And they can allow us to see a pattern from above and help us gain some emotional distance from it. To quantify, wrote Carl Sagan, was one of our most important “scientific tools” (though he also left room for qualitative approaches). Similarly, in Errol Morris’ outstanding documentary “The Fog of War,” one of Robert McNamara’s eleven lessons was simply “Get the data.” In sum, numbers are essential.

Yet numbers also have some limitations, particularly when it comes to war and human suffering. Sometimes, numbers seem to numb our humanity. As psychologist Paul Slovic has written, we are more apt to empathize with individuals in a way that is difficult when thinking about a multitude, an effect he referred to as “psychic numbing” (Slovic, 2007). For example, people are more likely to donate to charity after being presented with the story of a single affected person than statistics from a humanitarian disaster.

By now, the numbers from Gaza and Israel are fairly well-known. Hamas’ heinous terrorist attacks in Israel on October 7, which killed 1,200 people (including 845 civilians), injured 5,431, kidnapped 239 more, and included multiple brutal acts of sexual assault. Following that horrible day, many organizations have sought to quantify the effects of Israel’s military actions in Gaza.[1]  

Below are some of the figures, compiled from various sources:

• More than 20,000 people in Gaza have been killed (NYTimes, Dec 29)
• 70% of the dead have been women and children (PBS, Dec 2, via Gaza Ministry of Health)
• 53,688 people have been injured (UNOCHA, Dec 29 via Gaza Ministry of Health)
• 9,500 rockets, mortars, and drones have been fired at Israel since Oct 7 (Times of Israel, Nov 9, via the IDF)
• Over 29,000 munitions have been fired into Gaza, 40 to 45% of which were unguided “dumb” bombs (Washington Post Dec 14, via the Office of the Director of National Intelligence).
• 1.9 million people, roughly 80% of the population of Gaza, have been displaced since Oct 7 (United Nations Dec 12)
• Perhaps 1,000 children have had limbs amputated, according to UNICEF spokesperson James Elder (Euronews, Dec 12)
• 68 journalists have been killed, said to be “the most journalists killed in a single year in one location” (Reuters Dec 21).
• There have been 37,379 at least partially destroyed structures (mostly buildings), including 10.049 completely destroyed (Washington Post Dec 23).
• In northern Gaza, roughly 32% of structures have been destroyed in seven weeks. By comparison, 40% of structures were destroyed in Aleppo, Syria in three years, pointing to the intensity and scale of the bombing (Washington Post Dec 23).
• 65,000+ housing units have been destroyed in Gaza (UNOCHA, Dec 29 via Gaza Ministry of Public Works and Housing).
• An estimated 22% of agricultural land in Gaza has been razed, including greenhouses, olive groves, and fields (France24, Dec 12). Human Rights Watch has written this appears to be part of a strategy to use starvation as a weapon of war (HRW Dec 18).
• By Oct 16, there was a 90% drop in electricity in Gaza, compared with Oct 6 (Washington Post Oct 30).
• The conflict has knocked 27 of 35 hospitals across Gaza out of operation, according to the WHO (PBS Nov 24).
• There have been over 100,000 cases of gastrointestinal issues/ diarrhea, with rates among children 25 times higher than pre-Oct 7 levels (NPR, Dec 26).
• 2.2 million people in Gaza are said to be in “crisis” levels (IPC stage 3) of acute food insecurity, or worse. It is believed that 576,000 people (26% of Gaza) have exhausted their food supplies and are in IPC stage 5, or famine conditions (World Food Program Dec 21).
• Among displaced households, “inadequate” and “poor” food consumption were at 93% and 66%, respectively. These numbers had increased from 83% and 39%, from the previous survey 12 days earlier, indicating rapid deterioration (World Food Program Dec 14).
• Access to water was also severely low, at less than 2 liters per person per day (World Food Program Dec 14). By comparison, the World Health Organization lists 2.5 to 3 liters per day as “survival” levels for consumption in emergencies (WHO).
• At least 7,685 children under age 5 years showed severe wasting (emaciation), the deadliest form of child malnutrition requiring urgent medical treatment to avoid death (Save The Children, early Dec).  

To the best of my knowledge, these figures are as accurate as we can know at this point. They will certainly change. There is little indication that sufficient political will to stop the assault of Gaza exists, at least in Israel or the United States (which vetoed a resolution for a humanitarian ceasefire), meaning the deaths, and the damage, and the very real human suffering will assuredly accumulate.

According to Huynh et al (2023), there is no evidence that the Gaza Ministry of Health has reported inflated casualty numbers (this is despite President Biden saying he had “no confidence” in the figures in October). In fact, it is virtually certain that the damage has been underestimated. This is because assessing the harm stemming from conflict is a notoriously difficult task for a few reasons.

The first and most obvious reason is that unsafe conditions often prevent data collection. Retrospective population surveys are thus the preferred technique, since passive data collection, such as through morgue tallies or media reports, may miss some cases and underestimate casualty estimates (Alkhuzai et al, 2008). Second, initial reports usually focus on direct, violent casualties (from heavy ordnance, small arms fire, etc). However, they often overlook the indirect, or excess, damage. As one young woman in Gaza, Nour AlSaqqa, told the New York Times, “If the bombs didn’t kill us, our living situation will.” Armed conflicts regularly create a cascade effect. The breakdown in infrastructure (roads, hospitals, homes, electricity, schools, supply chains, food, water, banks, public health, immunizations, lack of medicine) can in turn make formerly treatable conditions difficult, and allow communicable diseases to spread in densely populated areas among weakened, malnourished people. This creates the conditions for illness and mortality to rise in a way that would not have occurred under more stable circumstances.

Next, the effects of war can become embodied, or get “under our skin,” in subtle ways that are greatly overlooked. Wars have been associated not only with PTSD, but also depression and anxiety that can last for at least six decades (Kuwert et al 2009). Wars have also been shown to lead to infection, short stature, delayed adolescence and menarche, chronic metabolic diseases, asthma, and the embodiment of toxic metals (Clarkin 2019). And much of what we know of how conflict can create intergenerational trauma comes from the children of Holocaust survivors, suggesting that the effects can extend beyond the generation that directly experienced conflict and into the next one (Yehuda et al 1998). Altogether, what this means is that a fuller account of the damage will not be known for some time.

The final reason that the harms of war are difficult to assess is that there will always be more to measure, and there are things that simply can’t be quantified. As Stephen Jay Gould once wrote about Carrie Buck, a woman who was sterilized against her will, “can one measure the pain of a single dream unfulfilled?” How can one adequately measure the pain of losing a child, sibling, parent, or spouse? Those bonds have been cut, irrevocably, and all of the shared experiences that would have otherwise occurred can no longer be. They have vanished into the ether. How can one quantify the generational resentments that build over the injustices imposed on them? Despite the necessity of documenting and confronting all the numbers above, they must always fall short. Numbers by themselves are inert and sterile, and as Paul Slovic reminded us, they fail to adequately engage our emotions, becoming “human beings with the tears dried off.” Altogether, what this means is that however you tally up the costs of war in whatever ledger you are compiling, you can never measure it all. There will always be more.

“The Price of Waging a War”

When President Biden was asked about casualties in Gaza in October, he expressed skepticism about the scale of destruction. He also said something revealing, adding “I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war.” I’ve heard similar opinions elsewhere, that civilian casualties should be expected and there’s nothing to be done. We just have to accept them. What is left unspoken is that someone has decided that the objectives of a conflict supersede the value of innocent life. Those people are simply in the way. And, at the risk of sounding repetitive, you don’t know “the price” because you haven’t measured all the variables. And what price would be acceptable? Are 1,000 deaths too many? 50,000? Are 500,000 displaced people too many? A million? Here again we see the limit of numbers. They resonate weakly with our conscience, when compared with, say, the story of parents lamenting the loss of their 25 year-old daughter Rachel, massacred at a music festival, or a mother weeping over the loss of her 8 year-old twins, Ahmed and Jihan, killed by bombs ostensibly meant for someone else.

For Hamas, its objective was to …. what? Exact revenge? Vent rage? Instigate a wider war? Israel’s expressed objective has been to extinguish Hamas, to ensure another October 7 does not reoccur. Israeli officials have also expressed regret over innocents killed, most recently over a strike on the Al-Maghazi refugee camp that killed dozens of people. Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett told CNN that he wished there was a “magic way to dramatically reduce collateral damage,” adding that the current ratio of civilian to militant casualties was within the range of previous wars and was therefore acceptable. That is debatable, both whether that ratio is within range, and what ratio is acceptable. According to the English jurist William Blackstone (1723-80), it was “better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.” He was, of course, referring to protecting the innocent from unjustified imprisonment. How much should we modify our calculus when thinking about the unjustified death of innocents?

Moreover, given the scale of the destruction, the objectives of Israel appear to be more than merely eradicating Hamas. Two days after Hamas’ attacks, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that “We are going to change the Middle East ….(and)… What we will do to our enemies in the coming days will reverberate with them for generations.”

All wars do, in ways most people don’t even fathom. In the meantime, the minimum we can do is to hold onto a part of our humanity by remembering that people are more than numbers.

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References

Alkhuzai, Amir H., et al. 2008, Violence-related mortality in Iraq from 2002 to 2006. The New England Journal of Medicine 358(5): 484-493. Link

Clarkin PF (2019) The Embodiment of War: Growth, Development, and Armed Conflict. Annual Review of Anthropology 48:1, 423-442Link

Huynh BQ, Chin ET, Spiegel PB. 2023. No evidence of inflated mortality reporting from the Gaza Ministry of Health. The Lancet. Dec 6. Link

Kuwert P, Brähler E, Glaesmer H, Freyberger HJ, Decker O. 2009. Impact of forced displacement during World War II on the present-day mental health of the elderly: a population-based study. Int Psychogeriatr. 21(4):748-53. Link

Slovic P. 2007. “If I look at the mass I will never act”: Psychic numbing and genocide. Judgment and Decision Making 2(2): 79-95. Link

Yehuda R, Schmeidler J, Wainberg M, Binder-Brynes K, Duvdevani T. Vulnerability to posttraumatic stress disorder in adult offspring of Holocaust survivors. American Journal of Psychiatry. 1998 Sep 1;155(9):1163-71. Link

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[1] The organization Human Rights Watch verified many videos of Hamas’ attacks https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/10/18/israel/palestine-videos-hamas-led-attacks-verified