Bulletin N°58 juin 2025 How many Palestinians have disappeared in Gaza?
On June 1 , Israeli sociologist Yaakov Garb, a Harvard University professor, published a 9-page report, “Israeli-American/GHF Aid Distribution Centers in Gaza,” based on data from the occupation army. The report’s introduction clearly states what it demonstrates: “ This report provides maps, location data, and a brief initial analysis of the Israeli-American/GHF aid distribution centers, rapidly constructed and operational in Gaza by May 2025. The overall geographic relationship of these centers to the Gazan population and the infrastructure of Israeli military control of Gaza, as well as their consistent internal architecture, suggest that their design primarily responds to Israeli military strategy and tactics rather than to a broad humanitarian intervention. ” Indeed, Yaakov Garb concludes that these new Israeli-American “aid centers” are in fact designed according to a purely military logic of control over the Gazan population, violating the most basic humanitarian principles.
For his analysis, YaakovGarb relies on Israeli data counting the Palestinian population in the “humanitarian enclaves” designated by the army: Gaza City: 1 million; Central Gaza: 350,000; Mawasi: 500,000; which makes a total of 1.85 million people. However, before October 7, 2023, Gaza had a population of approximately 2.227 million, according to official sources. This means that 377,000 people are missing who do not appear in any enclave in this data. This number of 377,000 is not included, but results from a simple subtraction. 377,000 out of a little over 2 million. There are the dead, the missing, those who were made to disappear into mass graves after being doused with an extremely powerful solvent. War criminals exterminated between 15 and 20 percent of the population. This ratio is rarely reached, even in genocide. Hundreds of thousands are flattened under the rubble by bulldozers, hundreds of families are erased from civil records, with no survivors to testify. The Zionist entity burns and destroys all evidence of their existence, and the Western imperialists give them time to clean up.
Note that, as early as January 1 , 2025, Al Jazeera announced: " Gaza's population has decreased by about 160,000 Palestinians since the start of Israel's war against the enclave, according to the official Palestinian statistics agency. " Finally, the Lancet , a little less than a year ago, estimated the number of deaths in Gaza at 180,000.
Gaza, for the official media in France, silence, we are massacring!
A journalist from Arrêt sur Images made the effort to systematically watch all the midday and evening news programs on the three general interest channels: TF1, France 2 and M6 in order to measure the time devoted to the genocide in Gaza during the week of Friday, June 13 inclusive to Friday, June 20 inclusive, where everyone was fixated on the Zionist entity's aggression against Iran. The result is derisory: for M6, 12 seconds at midday and 46 seconds in the evening; for TF1, 23 seconds at midday and 26 seconds in the evening; finally, for France 2, nothing at midday and 14 seconds in the evening.
Yet, on Tuesday, June 17, 59 Palestinians were killed and more than 200 injured in Khan Younis while waiting for humanitarian aid trucks to pass. Yet, on Wednesday, June 18, Dr. Ahmad al-Farra, head of the maternity and pediatric ward at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, launched a first appeal to save these premature babies who no longer have enough milk to live. Yet, on Thursday, an Israeli drone bombed a tent in the Al-Shati refugee camp. Palestinians were coming there to recharge their phones. The images are horrific. We see the bodies of dead children, and a man burning in the fire caused by the bombs.
Yet, from June 13 to 20, at least 537 Palestinians were killed and 2,300 wounded by Israel. But, true to their attitude for the past year and a half, state media (one can no longer decently call it "public service") and private media have been tasked with keeping quiet about what is happening. Thus, we have been treated to piles of reports on the unfortunate Zionists hit by Iranian missiles, very little on the destruction and deaths of civilians in Iran, and nothing on the ongoing massacre in Gaza. No official media has documented the main news since at least mid-May: the Zionists are using their monopoly on food distribution to lure starving Gazans into traps where many of them are injured or killed.
In an article published by Acrimed on June 23, a journalist from Le Media, Amina Kalache, looks back on the sessions of the International Court of Justice at the end of April, and especially on the lack of coverage of these events in France.
" The great hall of the International Court of Justice was silent, solemn. In this last week of April 2025, the unthinkable was being pleaded: famine used as a weapon of war in Gaza, the methodical destruction of the Palestinian people, alleged acts of genocide, " she tells us. The UN Special Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, considered that there were "reasonable grounds" to believe in the materiality of several acts falling under this definition. Before the judges in The Hague, South Africa, Malaysia, Ireland, Qatar, and France spoke out about the suffering of a population locked up, bombed, and starving. And yet, continues Amina Kalache: " The French-speaking press was not present. Few microphones, few cameras. As if this event were not worth recounting. The hearings were certainly requested urgently." But the issue was a major one: the crushing of an entire humanitarian system, particularly in the case of UNRWA. The UN agency, created in 1949, is the main humanitarian pillar for Palestinian refugees, providing education, healthcare, and food aid to approximately 5.9 million people. In October 2024, the Israeli parliament passed two laws banning its activities in the occupied Palestinian territories, notably worsening access to vital aid in Gaza. A decision described as a humanitarian catastrophe by many NGOs, but also during these anticipated hearings .
It is not a question of a lack of means, but of a chosen disinterest, a political option. Western imperialists support their Zionist creature, the vehicles of the dominant ideology use all the means at their disposal to serve the interests of the big US and EU capitalists who profit from the colonization of Palestine. However, silence seems to be the only asset they have left that is even slightly effective; the omnipresence of Zionists on TV sets only annoys, the Zionist entity is banned from the nations. We must try to restore its image, hence the images of certain damage from Iranian missiles (not the significant material damage that would show the Zionist defeat), the complaints for the poor inhabitants of Tel Aviv (curiously, very few of those in Haifa) and the complete silence on Gaza. A particularity of this silence concerns the so-called supply of Gazans by the Zionists. Now that it is impossible to criticize UNRWA or to say that it is the Resistance that is seizing food, there is only one solution: a blanket of silence to try to hide the massacres being carried out by the occupying army.
More than ever, anticolonialism
We cannot avoid talking about Gaza every day. It is essential to make the name of Palestine resonate everywhere. To do this, we must tell what is happening and share testimonies. But, as we emphasized last week, it is essential not to limit ourselves to emotion, otherwise we risk spreading a false image of the Palestinians, an image of victims and not of fighters for their freedom, who constitute a huge stone in the shoe of the Zionist entity and therefore of Western imperialism.
For the Revolutionary Communist Party, it is necessary to tirelessly disseminate the elements that allow us to understand the colonial situation in general and the specific situation of the substitute colonization in Palestine. We must say again and again why the defense of the Palestinian Resistance is not solidarity with a distant struggle that does not directly concern us, why the emancipation of the Palestinians is inseparable from our own emancipation.
This involves dismantling all the arguments surrounding "peace between Israelis and Palestinians," which is an illusory slogan; there is no "Israeli" proletariat, but Zionist settlers, and absolutely not anti-colonial. The French left and the CGT, which unanimously defend this concept, are in fact hampering the defense of the Palestinian Resistance and preventing its development.
There is no support or defense of Palestine without characterizing the colonial character of the Zionist entity, without denouncing its existence, without mentioning the national liberation struggle. The colonial question must be articulated with the national question to which it belongs, and with the fundamental question in Palestine of land ownership.
For this mobilization in France to be stronger, we need, more than ever, a clear, anti-colonialist, anti-Zionist discourse, denouncing the actors, the accomplices of the substitute colonization implemented in Palestine, the accomplices of the genocide of the Zionist entity which increasingly resembles that of the American West, perpetrated there also by European settlers!!! We need a clear position, total support for the Palestinian people, for their resistance, in all its forms, from everyday gestures to armed combat. It is not possible to support the struggle for a free Palestine without supporting the armed Resistance, in all its components and in all its actions; without demanding the end of the colonial state of apartheid, because its existence prevents true peace . We must therefore move away from all the "shared wrongs" positions, in a political landscape marked by the historical weakness on the left of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism in France.
In conclusion
More than ever, active solidarity is needed from peoples and workers around the world with the resistance of the Palestinian people, in Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem. It is high time that a large-scale popular demonstration be organized throughout France to support the Palestinian people's struggle for national liberation and to proclaim that enough crimes are enough, and that the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people must be recognized.
Such a demonstration must carry the demand for a just peace in Palestine. A just peace means the dismantling of settlements, the return of refugees, and a state where all residents enjoy equal rights and can live together, regardless of their origins—in this case, a democratic and independent Palestinian state.
The Revolutionary Communist Party supports more than ever the fundamental demands of the Palestinian national liberation movement: a complete end to Zionist military aggression, the right of return for refugees, and the formation of a Palestinian state on the territory of Mandatory Palestine.
The Zionist colonial state will fall. We cannot say when, but it will fall. This is the meaning of history.