THE biggest con trick Israel has managed to pull off over the past two years is imposing entirely phoney parameters on a ‘debate’ in the West about the credibility of the death toll in Gaza, now officially standing at just over 70,000. It is not just that we have been endlessly bogged down in rows about whether Gaza’s medical authorities can be trusted, or how many of the dead are Hamas fighters. (Despite Israeli disinformation campaigns, the Israeli military itself believes more than 80 per cent of the dead are civilians.) Or even that these ‘debates’ always ignore the fact that, early on, Israel wrecked Gaza’s capacity to count its dead by destroying the enclave’s governmental offices and its hospitals. The 70,000 figure is likely to be a drastic under-estimate. No, the biggest con trick is that Israel has successfully penned us all into a ‘debate,’ one entirely divorced from reality, that relates only to those killed directly by its bombs and gunfire. The truth is that far, far ...