The New Dark Age

Friday, 12 September 2025 — Al Mayadeen English

Professors Richard Hil and Gideon Polya highlighted Ralph Nader’s urgent plea for accurate reporting on “Israel’s” genocide in Gaza, noting that while mainstream media relies on data from the Health Ministry in Gaza, the figures “must include not only those killed through direct violence, but also fatalities resulting from imposed deprivation.”

Nader estimates that the death toll is “closer to 500,000” when “drawing on epidemiological studies that consider deaths from injury, trauma, lack of medicines, water, food, shelter, and other basic necessities.”

He argues that highlighting this horrendous figure “would affect the intensity of the political, diplomatic, and civic pressures for a ceasefire. It would also prompt more strenuous calls for immediate humanitarian aid, an immediate ceasefire, and peace negotiations,” as well as aid in holding Netanyahu’s government and Israeli occupation forces accountable.

An article published earlier this year by Hil and Polya concluded that “the actual death toll of 680,000 deaths from violence and imposed deprivation by 25 April 2025 (28% of the pre-war Gaza population of 2.4 million),” including 136,000 deaths from violence and 544,000 from deprivation.

In addition to that, out of the 680,000 deaths, 380,000 are infants under five years of age, 479,000 children in total, and 63,000 women and 138,000 men.

“What journalists, academics, activists, and others should not abide – morally or politically – is the reporting of fatalities that ignores the true scale of the carnage in Gaza. We have a duty to those who have lost their lives to properly remember their passing,” Hil and Polya argue.