Playing With Figures In Gaza – OpEd
Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is using the Gaza ceasefire that was signed at the behest of US president Donald Trump on 10 October to thrash down the enclave and continue to starve its people.
But first thing first! Since the end of the war, Tel Aviv violated the ceasefire 813 times. Put it another way Israel, and through its army, openly and unashamedly has violated the ceasefire 25 times every day, shooting and bombing everything that moves in Gaza including homes, infrastructure and buildings bombed for the umpteenth time!
More alarmingly, and in flagrant violations of the accord, Israeli planes, missiles and tanks killed about 400 people so far and most of these are civilians, namely women and children, figures which can be checked by the Government Media Office in Gaza and recognized by world governments as legitimate.
As a result, the number of the Palestinians injured in Gaza after 10 October, 2025 has been alarmingly high. A total of 1063 were reported as injured in the first two months of the ceasefire. And their injuries emanated from daily Israeli attacks including shootings at civilians, shelling and air strikes whilst disregarding the agreements and accords signed by Israelis and Trump himself.
The Israelis, with Netanyahu at the forefront, have been saying they are firing at the remnants of Hamas operatives and their military machine and soldiers have been fighting at specific targets and objectives. But surely Hamas fighters are not among civilian conurbations of mass returnees who started to come back to their destroyed homes and houses and try and pick up the pieces.
Hamas, together with the other Palestinian resistance groups have shown remarkable restraint since the signing of the ceasefire and this is recognized by such world leaders as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. On the whole, and today as well, Palestinian factions are choosing not to return fire despite the Israeli military violations.
Hamas has preferred not to militarily engage during the ceasefire for in the entire two months only five Israeli soldiers were killed and no more than a handful injured which is a record in this past two years where around 1150 soldiers were killed according to Israel figures. Though these must be taken with a pinch of salt.
Playing the conspiracy game the Israelis have been and are saying the reason why Hamas is not engaging in conflict is because it is using the ‘ceasefire hiatus’ to re-energize itself and make its fighters strong again. But Israel has a different agenda which is to continue to keep Gaza in a deep malaise because over the past year it was never able to eradicate Hamas nor expel the Palestinians from Gaza while it got a beating from a far weaker party than an Israeli state strongly supported by the United States.
Because of this, Israelis are licking their wounds in a different way. The ceasefire agreement has and agreed upon that 600 aid trucks enter Gaza daily. Experts explained this is what is needed to reverse or at least to begin to deal with the ‘starvation mode’ the Palestinians of the enclave have been subjected to. But this figure has never been reached according to international agencies.
The Israeli Coordination of Government Activities for the Territories (COGAT), which is really a euphemism for occupying and controlling the Palestinian territories, stated that 459 trucks per day entered Gaza between 12 October and early December. But this number is widely disputed by UN figures which stated that Israel has only allowed 113 trucks to enter Gaza daily since the start of the ceasefire.
This is far lower than the figures reported by the Gaza Government Media Office which stated that on average Israel only allows 226 trucks to enter the enclave on a daily basis. However, this is still far lower than the 600 trucks it originally agreed upon for the devastated and war-torn Strip.
However, Gaza is still in the beginning. So far, Israel has refused to move to the second stage of the Trump plan while preferring to continue to bomb the Strip under the pretext that the final dead Israel hostage, number 28, has not been delivered yet. Meanwhile Hamas fighters are still looking in a strip that has been devastated and where torn bricks and mortar has replaced ordinary living. Where do you look in an Israeli-induced hideousness is a guess for Hamas, mediators Doha and Cairo as well as Washington.
But time is ticking. Trump is in no hurry, neither apparently Netanyahu, who with American-supplied weapons, can bomb as much as and as long as he wants, people who have been forgotten by their Arab neighbors: Nope, Gaza doesn’t exist over here, the people – all two million of them must be left to defend for themselves regardless of the Israeli butchery.
In the war on Gaza over 70,000 have been killed while more than 171,000 injured and over 11,000 buried under a mass pile of debris and wreckage estimated at 68 million tons. Today, Israel continues to play the victim but one day it will have to answer for its atrocities.
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