By Admitting to Only 70K Dead and Disappeared In Gaza; Israel Is Haggling, Pleading Out, Copping to A Lesser Charge

 Ilana Mercer • February 6, 2026

Every common criminal and serial offender knows the tactic. Israel is copping a plea. Its pleading to a lesser charge. The ‘genocidal entity’ knows full well that the number of murdered (and maimed) in Gaza is many, many times higher. So, Israel cops to what is, in reality, the lesser charge.

To date, about 12 percent of Gaza’s population has been murdered, disappeared or detained.

In the lexicon of crime, what Israel is currently doing is called plea bargaining. Israel is copping to a lesser charge with respect to the number of Palestinians dead and disappeared by its death squads in Gaza.

Nothing if not cunning, the Israelis know just how reliably compliant the West’s pundits are. At least those who did time in mainstream media. As an example take the celebration among some self-styled independent media of the fact that Israel’s military now admits that 70,000 souls were murdered in Gaza.

The “genocidal entity” knows full well that the number of murdered (and maimed) Ghazzawi is many times higher. So, Israel cops to what is, in reality, the lesser charge. Every common criminal and serial offender knows the tactic.

Moron media fail to comprehend that Israeli leadership is copping to a lesser charge with the intent to sustain Israel’s international impunity.

What the dumb, non-dissident media is doing is being itself. Reflexively, it is offering Israel a plea bargain in advance. “You can’t fix stupid,” said one Texas funny man. “There is not a pill you can take or a class you can go to. Stupid is forever.”

On top of that, since Israelis keep killing and destroying as the fancy takes them; the 70,000 plea-bargained figure, readily accepted by the Israeli perpetrators who are still on the lam, is no longer valid. Even that erroneous undercount, reported by CNN too, is outdated. Late in December of 2025, OCHA had counted 70,668; Haaretz 71,000.

In fact, as far back as June 26, 2025, Nir Hasson, writer for Haaretz, announced that, “Yes, in Gaza about 100,000 human beings were already killed.” Later, in the Hebrew edition of July 18, Haaretz featured an op-ed by a “University of London” expert in the assessment of the casualties of “war” (“genocide is not war”), who admitted that “Yes, in Gaza about 100,000 human beings had already been killed.”

After that, on November 25, 2025, theMax Planck Institute for Demographic Research(MPIDR) proclaimed that “the current violent death toll” in Gaza likely exceeded 100,000. While their underestimation is already invalid for obvious reasons; at least the “great” scientific minds of the Max Planck Institute understand that the situation in Gaza is … fluid.

With the pomp of officialdom, the MPIDR and the Centre for Demographic Studies (CED) had proffered that the death toll in Gaza, which this lot appears to attribute to the inchoate forces of “armed conflict and political instability,” will keep rising and life expectancy will continue to sharply decline.

How does one even respond? An inelegant Dah? An eye roll? I’ll go one better:

Why don’t we all settle down and wait for the “legitimate” Piers Moron Media, in their infinite wisdom, to remind us that the “evidence” in Gaza has yet to be carefully bagged and tagged, and that before the serial-killer state can be named and implicated in the homicide of hundreds-of-thousands of Palestinians; fingerprints must be lifted from each and every corpse.

More seriously, one might inform the misguided simpleton media and the MPIDR that their belated undercounts were preceded by others like them months ago. Nir Hasson aforementioned. And before Haaretz came The Lancet.

Ten months into the genocide, in July of 2024, The Lancet, an august British medical journal, pegged the direct and indirect casualties of Israel’s industrial-scale mass murder in Gaza at around 186,000, then. Look around you now at Gaza’s landscape and the spectral souls who’re now confined to the western half of the tiny enclave. (The demonic Israel Defense Forces have bisected the Strip, occupied the east, and are surreptitiously stealing western Gaza.)

In 2024, Airwars (via “Bearing Witness – Gaza,” by Lee Mordechai, historian and Israeli citizen, July 5, 2025), “An independent non-profit that collects data on violent conflict worldwide,” suggested that “by almost every metric, the harm to civilians from the first month of the Israeli campaign in Gaza is incomparable with any 21st century air campaign. It is by far the most intense, destructive, and fatal conflict for civilians that Airwars has ever documented. … One expert claimed Israel’s war on Gaza may have been the fastest case of killing 1% of the population in the 21st century, and the death of 2% of the population [at that stage] placed the Gaza conflict among the five most lethal conflicts in the 21st century.”

Make that 12 percent.

The Airwars report hails from 2024. On the ground, always beyond reproach; Euro-Med Monitor’s observers reported, in November of 2025, that 12 percent of Gaza’s Palestinians has been murdered, disappeared or detained.

From the evidence I had collected as early as November of 2023—I felt it not imprudent to deduce then that, twelve months on, we’d be speaking of the following distinct possibility: By the time the Israeli serial killers are cajoled into stopping the carnage, there could be at least 250,000, maybe more, direct and indirect Palestinian deaths brought about by Israel.

Why did I so surmise in November of 2023? Well, the thing itself speaks. Res ipsa loquitur. And my own simple calculations helped.

Early in December Of 2023, in the face of Israel’s unfathomable ferocity and falseness—killing and lying about everything in sight—I set about to conduct a proportional, if limited, mathematical comparison as to just how vampiric the ‘vaunted’ Israel Defense Forces are.

Force-fed the fiction of the IDF as the most moral army in the world; I decided to compare like with like, albeit in limited but significant theaters of “war.” My December 2023 modest inquiry endeavored to compare Israel’s offensive in Gaza against “Hamas,” late in 2023, to America’s onslaught in Fallujah against the Iraqi resistance, in 2004.

On the numbers, I had been exceedingly charitable to the Israelis, given that their victims, buried beneath the rubble, were still mostly unaccounted for, and considering that the IDF resumed hostilities against civilians on December 1, after the briefest pause.

“Gaza Vs. Fallujah, Barbaric Blitzkrieg Highlights U.S. Marines Superiority,” yielded these results:

“Were Fallujah as populated as Gaza (2.4 million), the United States Marines would have killed approximately 4,200 Iraqi souls by December 2023. This is a far cry from the Israel Defense Forces’ butcher’s bill of 15,000 civilians (acknowledged) dead in Gaza by 2023’s end—and climbing.”

Were Gaza as small as Fallujah (400,000); the Israelis, befitting their butcher’s bill until December of 2023, would still have killed at least 2,500 souls to our Marines’ 700. Ceteris paribus, naturally.

Furthermore, does the rational mind really need the plonks at Max Planck and their Bayesian modeling methodology to tell him or her that which is before our very eyes; to tell us what deductions that cleave to reality have produced over two years?

Consider the destruction of infrastructure alone (courtesy of the Institute for Palestine Studies) and the humanitarian- and service sector martyrs who man it:

• Percentage of destroyed civilian infrastructure: More than 90%.
• Initial direct losses in all sectors: More than 70 billion USD.
• Amount of rubble in the Gaza Strip: More than 61 million tons.
• Number of explosives dropped on Gaza: More than 200,000 tons.
• Number of unexploded ordnances/bombs: More than 20,000.
• Area of the Gaza Strip seized by occupation through invasion and fire: More than 80%.
• Number of hospitals destroyed or disabled: 38.
• Number of destroyed universities and educational institutions: 165.
• Number of destroyed schools: 670.
• Number of mosques completely destroyed: 835.
• Number of days border crossings were closed: More than 600.
• Number of aid trucks denied entry by the occupation: More than 120,000.
• Number of food kitchens and aid distribution centers targeted: 108.
• Number of martyrs from medical personnel: 1,670.
  Number of martyrs from Civil Defense crews: 140.
• Number of martyred municipal employees, including 4 mayors: 176.
• Number of martyred police and aid security personnel: 787.
• Number of martyred UNRWA employees: 203.
• Number of martyred journalists: 254.
• Number of martyred scientists, academics, and teachers: 1,023.
• Number of martyred athletes: 894.

This account, too, is no longer current.

After all, Israeli pleasures and pastimes are killing Palestinians. Nobody can keep up with the IDF’s relentless bloodletting. And many, like our American envoys, have covered it up. It might have been easier for Americans to confront the enormity of Israel’s crime had the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem not “suppressed a February 2024 report on northern Gaza. (The excuse: The report “lacked balance.”)

The images attached to the 2024 embassy report—corpses on Gaza’s streets, predators not Israeli feeding on them; predators Israeli smearing the walls with messages of hate and rape, the guts of buildings bedecking a destroyed landscape pouring out from crumbling edifices—these came via a “UN fact finding trip.” They were “visual evidence of the conditions” the culprits (Israeli and American) hoped to conceal, bulldoze over, bury. Upon the corpses beneath the earth’s surface, the vampiric Kushner consortium proposes to erect structures sporting the vulgar gilt of a Trump tower, or that of the Trump White House ballroom (Liberace, a flamingly flamboyant performer, would have just loved it all.)

What’s left of Gaza, the land and the living ghosts that roam it, continues to peter out. Eighteen months since the Lancet’s 2024 estimate, given the scale of destruction of everything in sight—given that death, starvation and injury don’t end with a genocide nominally reduced—it’s not unreasonable to peg the loss of Palestinian life, via direct and indirect Israeli violence, at the estimated 250,000 souls at least.

Yet February 2025 finds The Lancet asleep to its own findings.

If in July of 2024, with some certainty, The Lancet had determined that Israel had directly and indirectly murdered around 186,000 Palestinian souls. By February of 2025, The Lancet had begun to deploy Israel’s plea-bargain undercount instead of their own initial figures.

On February 8, 2025, presumably as follow-up to its June 2024 report, The Lancet provided not so much of an update, as some weasel words instead.

Behold! A “capture–recapture analysis” has been affected!

The bafflegab the Journal has now adopted entails indirectly conceding that the Palestinian Ministry of Health (MoH), in the past, had “achieved good accuracy in mortality documentation,” with some under-reporting. However, the “level of under-reporting” the Journal puts at a mere 41 percent. Less than their researchers’ original, 2024 estimate of 186,000 souls lost to date.

As I remarked in 2004, during America’s onslaught on Iraq—you could trust The Lancet to be appallingly late to the Truth, or to prevaricate about it.

A far more credible source than Max Plonk is Mads Gilbert, a dedicated Norwegian physician, who had worked in Gaza for decades until banned by the Predator State, and who now attests that, before October 7, the average life expectancy in Gaza was 74 years.

Today, an infant born in Gaza can expect to live for 35 years, should he survive the Isra-American interregnum genocide now simmering: You know, the lull between full-blown genocide and the end of genocide. (I’d like to offer you a link to the Mads remarks about life-expectancy in Gaza. It’s the custom, over these pixelated pages, to cite, cite, cite. Google, alas—beholden to You Know Who—generally scrubs the links to explosive pro-Palestine interviews and articles. See “Israel paid Google $45m to help cover up Gaza starvation,” New Arab, September 6, 2025. This last news item was there when last I looked.)

Late in June of 2025, there was word of a “Harvard-published report, according to which 377,000 had gone missing or were dead in Gaza.”

Myself, I’ve been unable to access the data extracted from it, other than via another secondary source, Dr. Dahn Shaulis of the Higher Education Inquirer blog. Shaulis appears to recite data points he had collated from a document, “The Israeli/American/GHF aid distribution compounds in Gaza: Dataset and initial analysis of location, context, and internal structure,” authored by Professor Yaakov Garb of Ben-Gurion University, and posted at 21st Century Wire, on June 23, 2025.

Quite the chain of custody.

In “Gaza’s Disappeared,” dated June 25, 2025, Shaulis confirms the documentational provenance just cited above, writing that “prior to the 2023-25 siege, Gaza’s population was approximately 2.227 million. Israeli Defense Forces estimate that the three main populated enclaves now contain only 1.85 million people:

Gaza City: 1 million

Mawasi: 0.5 million

Central Gaza: 0.35 million.”

That leaves 377,000 Gazans whose whereabouts are unknown. While some may be displaced or trapped in inaccessible areas, the report strongly implies that the missing are dead—many likely buried under rubble, dismembered beyond recognition, or perished from starvation and disease in isolation.
This number dwarfs commonly cited death tolls and challenges the sanitized statistics reported in international media. It is not the product of speculation, but of direct analysis of Israeli military data. What Garb calls a ‘demographic horror story’ is also a legal and moral reckoning.

Let that sink in.

Although unconfirmed, I here repeat the 377,000 missing number because of the utter plausibility of it, given the extent of the cover-up and the territorial asphyxiation to which Palestinians are still being subjected.

Ultimately it will come down to “How many Gazans remain?”

In actuality, the plea is peanuts compared to the original indictment. As with so many of Israel’s quicksilver narratives—admitting that 70,000 Palestinians perished in Gaza is part of a process of haggling; hammering-out an agreement that pacifies both prosecution and defense, with truth falling by the way. Plainly, Israel’s aim is to subvert the truth.

As the predominant method of adjudication in the United States, the plea bargain is ideal for that. Since the plea bargain is nothing more than a negotiated deal, it subverts the very goal of any justice system; is a taint on any system of justice.

Not that you’d know it, but the justice system’s mandate is to unveil the truth.

The common criminal who accepts a plea confesses to a lesser charge, in exchange for a lighter sentence or no sentence.

This means no trial, no guilt phase and no penalty phase.

**

Ilana Mercer, paleolibertarian author, essayist and theorist, has been writing up an anti-war, anti-woke storm since 1998, starting in Canada. On arriving in the US, in 2002, her weekly column was right away syndicated. Mercer’s national syndication fell through shortly after due to writing in strident opposition to the war in Iraq. ILANA is described as “a system-builder. Distilled, her modus operandi has been to methodically apply first principles to the day’s events.” She’s Jewish, grew up in Israel ages five to nineteen, and left, at 19, never to return. She had refused to serve in the IDF, Israel’s compulsory military. Ilana’s focus since October of 2023 has been the genocide. A war against civilians is a war on civilization   

https://www.unz.com/imercer/by-admitting-to-only-70k-dead-and-disappeared-in-gaza-israel-is-haggling-pleading-out-copping-to-a-lesser-charge/