A reckoning for Israel awaits

It’s not possible to materially compensate someone for the grief they feel over the loss of a loved one. To suggest otherwise, is to disregard what it means to be human.

So far, in Gaza alone, the rate of killing, even by the modern standards of the world’s worst conflicts, is truly horrendous. If we consider the various calculations by leading academic and other researchers across the world who take into account avoidable deaths; that is, deaths from deprivations that would otherwise not have occurred in peacetime circumstances, then the Gaza death toll, as of 20 January 2025, is around 553,000 (23 percent of the pre-war Gaza population). This figure is necessarily an estimate, albeit carefully extrapolated from data presented in a series of recent articles in the leading medical journal, The Lancet. It is based on the estimated violent killings of 64,260 Palestinian people by IDF forces in the first 9 months of the present conflict, which began on 7th October 2023. The extrapolated death toll includes 393,000 children, 51,000 women, and 113,000 men.

Among these numbers are infants, the aged, people with disability and those in various states of ill health. This figure does not include foreign national aid workers and journalists who have lost their lives during the course of the conflict, nor does it account for life-altering injuries (often resulting in death), incalculable trauma, or the devastation wrought by ecocide (environmental destruction), and urbicide (the destruction of homes, infrastructure, cultural heritage, universities, schools, hospitals, medical institutions, and religious sites). As we write, Israel is dropping more US-supplied bombs on an already eviscerated landscape and traumatized population.

The asymmetrical ‘war’ (actually, a genocidal massacre) has, according to numerous credible human rights organsiations, involved umpteen breaches of international humanitarian law, including war crimes and crimes against humanity, as well as the trashing of various treaties and conventions. The International Criminal Court has issued warrants for the arrest of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant, while the International Court of Justice in Case 192 has demanded an end to the killing and the occupation, as well as payment of reparations to the Palestinian people under occupation in the 57 years since 1967.

These rulings indicate clearly that the ICJ in considers that there should be a reckoning, reflecting its initial judgment of a “plausible genocide”, an assertion already backed by numerous leading international legal scholars.

To consider the matter of compensation at a time when Gaza is still under horrific military attack and a humanitarian blockade, and in a context where Netanyahu is seriously entertaining how to operationalize Trump’s ‘Riviera’ solution, may seem premature. Still, at this juncture and based on careful calculations undertaken by Dr Gideon Polya, the reparation bill amounts to around $7.2 trillion (USD). Below we estimate some costs covering the period of occupation since 1967 and others following 7 October 2023.

1. 1. In 2024, the annual GDP per capita (in USD) for Israel was around $53,000 as compared to a little over $3,ooo for occupied Palestinians, a difference of $50,000 per person per year. The lost income per Palestinian over the last 57 years of occupation therefore would average out at about $25,000 per person per year. The average occupied Palestinian population over the period of occupation was about 3.379 million. The loss of income, therefore, amounts to roughly $4.8 trillion.

2.  Damage to infrastructure, housing and premises ($0.1 trillion). Gaza, formerly one of the oldest and largest cities of the Arab world, has been reduced to rubble. The online journal New Arab (August 2024) estimates the rebuilding cost at $80 billion or about $0.1 trillion.

3. The estimated cost of lives lost in Gaza since the most recent conflict began is around $1.9 trillion. The Value of a Statistical Life (VSL) is a measure increasingly used to calibrate the economic benefits of reduced mortality relating to a range of environmental, health and other policy-related investments and regulations that serve to keep people alive. The VSL cost in Australia is A$5.7 million, while the VSL applied to Gaza of $3.5 million per person, multiplied by the number of estimated deaths since 7 October, brings us to a figure of $1.9 trillion.

4.  The cost of long-term specialist medical care for injury and trauma is estimated at $0.3 trillion. The surviving 1.7 million Gazans will require long-term expert medical care for conditions arising from the Gaza massacre, including traumatic injury, and the long-term health consequences of lack of medicines and medical treatment for birthing (prenatal and postnatal), dehydration, malnutrition, starvation, disease and serious conditions such as cancer and diabetes. In calculating compensation, one approach would be to apply Israel’s annual per capita health expenditure of $3,444 per person per year which, when applied to the 1.7 million Gazan survivors comes in at $0.3 trillion.

5.  The restoration of heritage cultural sites is calculated at $0.1 trillion. It cost about $1 billion to repair Notre Dame. The Israeli army has destroyed 3 churches and 814 of Gaza’s 1,245 mosques and severely damaged 148 mosques since October 2023. If we assume a cost of $100 million to restore each of these religious sites, then the rough total cost will be somewhere in the region of $0.1 trillion.

These figures are of course only the tip of a huge iceberg. How, for instance, is it possible to replace the child care and education lost, or to compensate for the terrible psychological suffering that will endure for generations, or the physical injuries that will impact every aspect of a person’s life? The constant uprooting of people, the destruction of ways of life built up over millennia, the loss of everything that is cherished and familiar, is all part of the incalculable costs of a genocidal war.

Truth told; no-one knows precisely how many Palestinian people have been killed since 7th October 2023. Too many bodies still lie under the rubble, and the violent killings continue, as do the deaths from injury. Medical services are all but gone and aid workers are under constant attack.

Body counts on the part of warring parties are invariably politicized. In the case of Gaza, as Ralph Nader points out in an analysis placed on the US Congressional Record, Hamas has a vested interest in keeping the figures within certain limits (as it does not want to further inflame Palestinian criticism of its actions), while the Israeli state and the US for obvious reasons want the full extent of the horror to be concealed. 

It is only the careful, determined efforts of academic and other researchers around the world that can provide a glimpse of the likely true scale of Israel’s US-backed savagery. We will only know the full death toll if Israel permits all Gazans coming out on a cloudless day to permit high-definition satellite imaging. An unlikely prospect.

The failure of the international ‘community’ to morally condemn the illegal and reprehensible actions of the Israeli state, and its supplying of the means of death and destruction, are already matters of historical record.

All humanitarians and supporters of truth, love, and peace with justice must continue to agitate for a full reckoning that includes financial compensations and reparations, a truth-telling process, a full and sincere apology, and prosecution of war criminals.

Dr Richard Hil is adjunct professor in the School of Health Sciences and Social Work at Griffith University, Gold Coast; adjunct professor in the Faculty of Law, Business and Arts at Southern Cross University. He is an author, academic and activist. He is the author  of numerous books, notably co-authoring “The Sacking Of Fallujah. A People’s History” by Ross Caputi, Richard Hil and Donna Mulhearn.

Dr Gideon Polya taught science students at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia over 4 decades. He published some 130 works in a 5 decade scientific career, notably a huge pharmacological reference text “Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds” (2003). He has also published “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” (2007, 2021), “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History” (1998, 2008, 2022), “US-imposed Post-9-11 Muslim Holocaust & Muslim Genocide” (2020), “Climate Crisis, Climate Genocide & Solutions” (2020), “Free Palestine. End Apartheid Israel, Human Rights Denial, Gaza Massacre, Child Killing, Occupation and Palestinian Genocide” (2024), and contributed to Soren Korsgaard (editor) “The Most Dangerous Book Ever Published – Dangerous Deception Exposed!” (2020). For images of Gideon Polya’s huge paintings for the Planet, Peace, Mother and Child see: http://sites.google.com/site/artforpeaceplanetmotherchild/  .