No, CNN, Gaza's population didn't just fall. It was exterminated

For those of us following Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, it often feels as though there are two wars occurring, one on social media, where Palestinians communicate with us directly, sharing videos and photos of their daily horrors, and one in the headlines of the legacy media companies.

At the end of May 2024, two images began circulating on X. They depicted a skull held loosely in the white plastic we have seen draped over bodies for as makeshift shrouds in Gaza for months. The nasal cavity had signs of trauma — a cavern of shredded bone and tissues. The frayed ends of an occipital nerve stuck out from the eye socket.

To the left, a hand, pale with dust, gripped a phone with the screen tilted towards the viewer. In the first image, the phone showed a handsome, young man smiling; his beige t-shirt depicts the eerie presage of a grinning skull in a crown.

In the second, the phone zoomed in on the man’s smile. The front two teeth were slightly bucked and whiter than the surrounding lateral incisors and canines.

The viewer is compelled to compare these teeth with those of the skull to the right, its front teeth protruding slightly.

This was a family in Jabalia resorting to amateur dental comparison to identify their loved one, Mahmoud Abed-Rabbuh. Behind these images is the tremendous weight of the knowledge that there are thousands and thousands of bodies in Gaza that remain unidentified.

In the mainstream press, these deaths occur behind a veil of euphemism, if they’re reported on at all. While Israelis and, say, Ukrainians are killed, Arabs, especially Palestinians, simply die.

Headlines reflect a magical realism in which people explode spontaneously, bombs and missiles appear in midair with no sender, and large migrations of people occur with no cause.

Assal Rad, a senior research fellow at the National Iranian American Council, has been diligently editing these headlines for the course of the Palestinian genocide on her X account. With a digital red marker, she strikes through deceptive verbiage and changes the text from passive to active. Much of what she draws attention to is how headlines report Israeli deaths as fact while Palestinian deaths are “claimed” by family members or the Gaza Health Ministry.

Her corrections highlight the routine way in which major outlets obscure Israeli violence on a routine basis. “Gazans endure harsh conditions,” the New York Times states with no context. “Israel’s borders have shifted throughout its history,” winks the AP. “More than 200 children killed in Lebanon,” says Reuters, without naming the killer.

CNN's "falling" population and other euphemisms for mass murder in Gaza

Now CNN has published an article entitled, “Gaza’s population is falling, while Israel’s growth is slowing.” Even when acknowledging mass death of an unimaginable scale, torturous euphemism is deployed.

The article summarises a report by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) that states 6% of Gaza’s population is being killed (or “dropping” as CNN puts it), 96% of people are facing food insecurity, and 60,000 pregnant women are being endangered.

Endangered is placed in scare quotes. The forced displacement of Palestinians is described as 100,000 having “left Gaza.” The word genocide does not appear once. There is no mention of the ICC warrants. The mass death is cleanly described as a “heavy toll on the Palestinian enclave’s demographics.”

Half of the article is concerned with the report’s other finding that Israel’s population growth has slowed. They cite emigration as a major factor, making sure to remind readers of the October 7 attacks and Israel’s escalating conflict with Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Iran, but also the political fallout from Netanyahu’s previous assaults on the judiciary.

Consider the asymmetry of the penultimate paragraph: “[Israel] then launched a war on Hamas in Gaza after the Palestinian militant group led brutal attacks that killed more than 1,200 people and kidnapped more than 250 on October 7, 2023. Israel’s attacks since then have killed more than 45,000 people and injured 108,000 in Gaza, according to the health ministry in the strip.”

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No brutality, then, was involved in the killing of Abed-Rabbuh, presumably.

Still, the report and CNN’s article put to bed the oft-repeated falsehood that Gaza’s population has risen during the war. I have seen numerous accounts using outdated projections to argue that the birth rate — 66,000 births they caw — has exceeded the death toll over the course of the last 15 months, often.

The death toll in Gaza has become a point of obsession for Israel’s backers, and they have taken every opportunity to call it into question. A two-pronged approach has emerged whereby Israel destroys any infrastructure that would allow for accurate reporting and then attacks any estimations that are not their own.

Early on in the aggression, most major outlets decided to report casualties as being reported by the “Hamas-run” Ministry of Health. This was undoubtedly an editorial decision made at least in part to cast doubt upon the figures, despite the broad reliability of their reports in previous conflicts.

That did not stop US President Joe Biden from stating he has, “no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.” Later on, a correspondence in The Lancet that used data from previous recent conflicts to project that, conservatively, up to 186,000 deaths could be indirectly attributed to the conflict was met with hysterics.

To be sure, the casualty data coming out of Gaza is not reliable. Israel’s defenders believe that the near-total collapse of the healthcare system in Gaza and the resultant inability to keep track of the number of martyrs works in their favour.

However, the uncertainty cuts both ways. We have no idea how many martyrs remain unreported or under the rubble, and it will not be until Israel is finally compelled to allow independent investigators into the strip that we can begin to form an idea. There is no threshold for the number of victims required in the Genocide Convention.

Yet the preoccupation shows that officials believe the figures matter, if only in the court of public opinion. Back in November, UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy denied that what is happening in Gaza is genocide, stating the word is reserved for instances when “millions of people lost their lives in crises like Rwanda, the Second World War, the Holocaust, and the way that they are used now undermines the seriousness of that term.”

His comments were widely panned, not least because they contradicted the UK’s official position on the Yazidi and Srebrenica genocides.

Some day, the violence will end and independent investigators will finally be allowed into Gaza. We will hear testimonies and begin to understand just how many souls have suffered the same fate as Mahmoud. In the interim, outlets like CNN would do well not to further bury those under the rubble with obfuscatory language.

Alex Foley is an educator and painter living in Brighton, UK. They have a research background in molecular biology of health and disease. They currently work on preserving fragile digital materials related to mass death atrocities in the MENA region.

Follow them on X: @foleywoley

Have questions or comments? Email us at: editorial-english@newarab.com

Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.