The Truth About Gaza's Dead – Part 1: How We Got Here

Note from our Editor-in-Chief:

We are very privileged to unveil this new series on Gaza’s death toll from our newest Zeteo contributor, Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a trauma surgeon from California who volunteered in Gaza’s besieged hospitals in both 2024 and 2025. He was also the author of the acclaimed and viral New York Times op-ed, “65 Doctors, Nurses and Paramedics: What We Saw in Gaza.” Please do follow this three-part investigation of his over the next three days, and please do support Zeteo’s ongoing expansion by becoming a paid subscriber and/or donor. A free press isn’t free! - Mehdi

In prepared remarks that recently went viral, former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz lamented that she “can’t have a sane conversation” about Israel and Gaza because “you have TikTok just smashing our young people’s brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza… I want to give data and information and facts and arguments, and they are just seeing in their minds carnage, and I sound obscene.” (Not to be outdone, Hillary Clinton followed suit.)

Hurwitz continued that young people believe the “lesson of the Holocaust” is that “you fight the big powerful people hurting the weak people,” so “when on TikTok all day long they see powerful Israelis hurting weak, skinny Palestinians, it’s not surprising that they think, ‘Oh, I know the lesson of the Holocaust is you fight Israel.’” Hurwitz drew the obvious conclusion: young people took the wrong lesson from Holocaust education.

Leaving aside the evident lack of self-awareness, Hurwitz raises an important question: what do the “data and information and facts” tell us about what happened in Gaza in the past two years?

The latest US-Israeli attack on Gaza is “one of the most severe and indiscriminate uses of military violence against a civilian population in the 21st century,” as my co-authors and I recently wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine. I refer to it as a “US-Israeli attack” due to the US’s longstanding, crucial, and largely unconditional support for Israeli militarism. Since Oct.