War deaths are not only caused by direct violence, and they don’t stop when the fighting does. Civilians as well as combatants may succumb to earlier injuries, or to hunger and disease in the aftermath of conflict. In the longer run, disruption of food production, damage to infrastructure and suspension of medical services such as routine vaccinations can all result in peacetime deaths which are ultimately attributable to the war. Women and children are disproportionately affected.
More than 27,000 people have now been killed in Gaza, according to Palestinian authorities. Tens of thousands of people are injured, in many cases with life-changing injuries. What will become of those now known by the chilling abbreviation WCNSF – “Wounded child, no surviving family”?
The suffering and need is almost beyond imagination. Conditions continue to deteriorate and supplies run short. Hospitals have been destroyed or damaged, while health needs grow, with an increasing number of patients injured in airstrikes or falling sick from their living conditions. In one harrowing account this week, a paediatrician described a surgeon warning her that he had more urgent cases than the infant bomb victim she was treating: “I tried to imagine what was more pressing than a one-year-old with no hand and no legs who was choking on his own blood,” she added.
There is now growing chatter about the push by the US for an extended pause in fighting in exchange for the release of hostages, with the hope that this might ultimately be expanded into a permanent ceasefire. Intensive diplomacy is welcome and necessary, but will not easily deliver results. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, has said he would not agree to any deal requiring the release of thousands of Palestinian prisoners or the departure of Israeli troops from Gaza.
When the war eventually ends, the survivors will be left amid the rubble. Communicable diseases will spread more easily in densely packed settlements without proper sanitation. An estimated 50 to 62% of buildings in Gaza have likely been damaged or destroyed, and an even higher proportion of its homes. Balakrishnan Rajagopal, the UN special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, called this week for the offence of domicide – the mass razing of neighbourhoods – to be included in international humanitarian and criminal law.
There is only so much that relief work can do to ameliorate such a catastrophe. But the mass suspension of funding to the UN agency UNRWA – over allegations, described by the US as credible, that some employees participated in Hamas’s 7 October atrocities – is a terrible blow. It will exacerbate the suffering in a place where, says commissioner Philippe Lazzarini, more than 2 million people depend on its aid for “sheer survival”. Israeli media reports that ministers have also proposed limiting the inflow of aid to Gaza to weaken Hamas and increase pressure for the release of hostages.
Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University, wrote in the Guardian this week: “Palestinian children in Gaza will die, in the thousands, even if the barriers to aid are lifted today.” But every day that funding is suspended, that aid is impeded, and that bombs fall, will make it worse. Not only Israel, but those who continue to supply it with weapons while cutting off UNRWA funding, must be answerable.
