“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]  

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