Ralph Nader, a former candidate in multiple U.S. presidential elections, recently alleged—without providing any substantiating proof—that the Israeli military has killed over 400,000 people in Gaza since the war began in October 2023. His claims appeared in an article published Monday by the left-leaning digital outlet CounterPunch.
In the piece, titled “The Vast Gaza Death Undercount,” Nader argues that the scale of destruction in Gaza makes such a figure plausible. He writes that Gaza’s civilians could not “withstand over 115,000 tons of bombs, plus artillery, grenades, and snipers targeting civilians, with uncontrollable fires everywhere.” He also states that “five thousand babies a month are born into the rubble.”
Nader has made four attempts to win the U.S. presidency, though never on behalf of the two major political parties. He campaigned under the Green Party banner in 1996 and 2000—serving as its official nominee in the latter race—and later ran as an Independent in both 2004 and 2008.
The figure Nader puts forth vastly exceeds the official fatality count given by the Gaza Health Ministry, which is run by Hamas. Last month, the ministry claimed the number of deaths had surpassed 50,000. Nader rejected those figures, arguing that Hamas intentionally underreports deaths “to lessen the ire of its people for not protecting them.”
In addition to direct casualties, Nader attributes his 400,000 figure to indirect deaths and references other sources with higher tallies than Hamas’s own. Among them is the medical journal The Lancet, which estimated in a July 2024 article that fatalities in Gaza stood around 186,000—a figure still less than half of what Nader suggests.
He also criticized Hamas’s accounting methods, claiming that “Hamas counts only names of the deceased given by hospitals and mortuaries.”
Following the publication of Nader’s article, Salo Aizenberg of the media watchdog Honest Reporting told The Telegraph that Hamas had recently and quietly removed thousands of names from its previously released casualty lists. This observation was based on a review of updated figures issued by the group.
The revised list now shows that the majority of those killed—roughly 75%—were males between the ages of 13 and 55, a population segment closely aligned with Hamas’s fighting forces.
In contrast to earlier claims that women and children made up 70% of the casualties, Hamas’s latest update presents a very different picture. The Israeli government, for its part, reported in late March that its military operations had eliminated 20,000 Hamas combatants.
{Matzav.com}