The first phase of a ceasefire is now underway in war-ravaged Gaza.

The tiny enclave’s woe begotten people, now free to return home under the terms of the US/Qatari/Egyptian-brokered deal, are overjoyed.

That joy is tempered by the enormous death toll they’ve suffered, and the horrific devastation before their eyes.

Numbers speak volumes.

When Israel’s assault began, following Hamas’s October 7, 2023 breakout from what informed commentators refer to as a ghetto, an open-air prison, and a concentration camp — under comprehensive Israeli siege for seventeen years — Gaza’s population stood at 2.3 million.

That number is now smaller. The official death toll stands at 47,000, including 13,000 children, but an estimated 12,000 lie, unidentified and rotting, beneath the rubble left behind by US (and German) bombs and missiles.

Over a thousand were health care workers.

An estimated 1400 Gazan extended families have been wiped out entirely, some numbering in the hundreds.

Horrific as they are, these numbers low-ball the casualties in a war the world’s top court ruled plausibly genocidal.

A recent study published in the medical journal The Lancet estimates that, between October 7, 2023 and June 30, 2024, over 64,000 died from traumatic injuries inflicted by US bombs and missiles.

Another Lancet study, published last summer, pegged deaths from both direct and indirect causes (war-related hunger and illness), at 186,000.

Meanwhile, an estimated 110,000 Gazans have been injured; 1.9 million displaced — 90% of Gaza’s population.

Where Gaza’s internally displaced people will go, with the first phase of a ceasefire now apparently in place, is anyone’s guess.

Over 400,000 homes have been damaged or destroyed in Israel’s US-armed war of annihilation — 92% of Gaza’s pre-war housing stock.

‘Domicide’, experts call it.

The GPM spoke about all this with Paula Gaviria Betancur, Special UN Rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons. Late last year, Betancur and ten other independent human rights experts published a statement entitled “Israel’s assault on the foundations of international law must have consequences.”

Listen to our conversation with UN Special Rapporteur Paula Gaviria Betancur in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our complete conversation here:

With a ceasefire now underway in Gaza, after 15 months of unimaginable bloodshed and destruction, here are a few more figures in the Gaza numbers game:

Since the start of the war, last October, thirteen resolutions aimed at ending or pausing the bloodshed have come before the UN body responsible for ensuring international peace and security – the Security Council. Of these, four passed, three of them because the US abstained.

US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield and her deputies — self-professed devotees of peace, human rights, and the rule of law — have voted in favour of three watered-down resolutions (one of which ended up passing), and either voted against or vetoed seven.

They did so, having listened closely to testimony of the most gut-wrenching sort.

In this genre, on the eve of the Gaza ceasefire, a January 3 presentation to the UN Security Council by a pediatric intensive care physician named Tanya Haj-Hassan, with extensive experience tending to Gaza’s injured. Last July, Haj-Hassan and several dozen other physicians wrote to Joe Biden, sharing their experiences tending to Gaza’s wounded and maimed, and calling for an end to the genocide. The Biden Administration ignored their pleas.

A month later, having been denied a speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention, in Chicago, a group of physicians and human rights experts held their own panel on the margins of the Convention. Tanya Haj-Hassan was among them.

Listen to Tanya Haj-Hassan’s January 3 presentation to the UN Security Council. Click on the play button above, or go here.