What the numbers say about a failed ceasefire and the logic of zionism

As of October 29, 2025, Gaza's Ministry of Health reports 68,635 Palestinians killed since October 7, 2023 — a toll that includes 20,179 children — with 170,655 injured across 754 days of Israeli bombardment. Even the much-touted "ceasefire" implemented on October 10 has proven to be merely a recalibration of violence. In the twenty days since its announcement, Israel has killed 236 Palestinians in Gaza alone and at least another 600 have been wounded. This marginal reduction in the speed of killing reveals the ceasefire not as a cessation of hostilities, but as a managed continuation of zionism’s defining feature: the erasure of the Palestinian people. Israel’s daily killings of Palestinians continue because the underlying structure, a capitalist settler-colonial project requiring indigenous erasure for land accumulation, remains unchanged. The ceasefire merely adjusts the tempo of elimination to appease the liberal palette while preserving its structural trajectory.

These already catastrophic official figures (almost 70,000 documented killings) represent a profound undercount, obscuring the true scale of violence executed for western interests and the broader zionist movement. A February 2025 Lancet study determined that Gaza's Ministry of Health, despite its historically validated methodology, undercounts violent deaths by 41 percent, calculating 64,260 deaths through mid-2024 versus the Ministry's lower figures. More critically, the official toll by the Ministry of Health captures only direct violent deaths while systematically excluding "indirect deaths" from imposed deprivation, starvation, disease, untreated medical conditions, and exposure resulting from Israel's systematic destruction of shelter, healthcare infrastructure, water systems, and food access. Using the conservative 4:1 ratio of indirect to direct deaths standard in conflict epidemiology, researchers Richard Hil, Gideon Polya estimate that by April 2025, Gaza's actual death toll approached 680,000, including approximately 380,000 children under five years old. In modern conflicts, UNHCR data shows that indirect deaths from imposed deprivation consistently dwarf violent deaths, with ratios ranging from 2:1 to 16:1. As they noted in their research, the Iraq War (2003-2011) produced 1.2 million indirect deaths versus 1.5 million direct deaths, while the Afghan War (2001-2021) resulted in 6.4 million deaths from deprivation compared to just 0.4 million violent deaths—a 16:1 ratio. The 4:1 ratio applied to Gaza's death toll calculations is therefore highly conservative, likely significantly understating the true humanitarian catastrophe.

Behind these statistics lie names, lives, and futures extinguished by Israeli forces to satisfy capital's insatiable appetite for expansion in Palestine, which began well over a hundred years before October 7, 2023. Just take a look at just a few of the people killed on this day, November 1, throughout the years. On November 1, 2004, twelve-year-old Bashar Sami Sa'id Zabarah was shot dead by Israeli forces in Askar refugee camp while at a demonstration. A child's act of resistance met with lethal force, his small body treated as an obstacle to settlement expansion. Then on November 1, 2000, thirteen-year-old Ahmad Salman Ibrahim Abu Tiya and fourteen-year-old Ibrahim Rizeq Marzuq 'Omar were killed at Karni Checkpoint during demonstrations, both residents of al-Shati' refugee camp. Their killings at the hands of Israelis illustrate how refugee camps themselves act as living monuments of prior episodes of ethnic cleansing and continue to be sites of elimination when indigenous Palestinians refuse to disappear. While these children died years apart and in different locations across Palestine, their deaths share an identical logic: they occupied land that settler-colonialism demands for exclusive zionist use. Their existence as indigenous Palestinians with claims to that land made them, in the eyes of the settler state, part of a surplus population requiring removal. Their stories, multiplied by tens of thousands, reveal how individual tragedies aggregate into genocide, not as an aberration of capitalism, but as its logical expression rendered through the processes of zionism. Israel’s history is just one example of how settler-colonial structures commodify land while rendering its resistant indigenous inhabitants as obstacles to profit.

Ultimately, the reporting of deaths reflects a tragic methodological constraint: Gaza's Ministry of Health, operating under catastrophic conditions, counts only deaths documented at hospitals with rigorous standards that ensure credibility but inevitably excludes thousands buried under rubble, dying at home from starvation, or succumbing to disease in a collapsed medical system. This methodological conservatism is understood as strategically necessary for Palestinians to maintain international legitimacy to their liberal base. Palestinian authorities face an impossible choice: report only what can be verified under siege conditions, thereby maintaining credibility but obscuring the genocide's true scale; or estimate total mortality including indirect deaths, risking dismissal as "Hamas propaganda" by hostile audiences who may refuse the number of dead to be close to 680,000. This methodological bind itself constitutes a form of epistemic violence: Palestinians must document their own erasure according to standards designed for functioning states with the political support of the west, not populations trying to survive a genocide funded and supported by western governments.

This statistical undercount thus mirrors the physical erasure, as both serve zionism’s requirement that Palestinians cease to exist as a people with claims to land now designated for profitable development and extraction. The 20,179 children officially reported dead since October 7, 2023, a number representing perhaps fewer than half the actual child deaths when starvation, disease, and indirect mortality are included, testify to settler-colonialism's ultimate expression of elimination: it ensures the next generation can have no future indigenous claims to the land, and therefore, not tangible restitution or justice. Israel’s killings in Gaza are a reminder that every child's death isn’t collateral damage. Still, rather it is the central logic of a system that cannot tolerate indigenous futurity on land it has marked for capitalist transformation.