Original reporting sourced from 21st Century Wire, with data from Dr. Yaakov Garb’s 2025 report published on the Harvard Dataverse
A groundbreaking new report authored by Dr. Yaakov Garb, Professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and hosted on the Harvard Dataverse, reveals a brutal arithmetic behind Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. According to Garb’s spatial and demographic analysis, the number of Palestinians likely killed or missing in the Gaza Strip now exceeds 300,000. That figure—derived from Israel’s own internal data—calls into question the official death tolls promoted in mainstream media and reveals a staggering discrepancy: 377,000 people are unaccounted for.
These numbers expose more than just a humanitarian crisis. They reveal a calculated architecture of control, cloaked in the language of aid but functioning as an extension of military occupation. Yet as these truths emerge through academic and investigative channels, another battle is being waged—on college campuses across the U.S. and Europe—where students who dare to speak out are increasingly being targeted for suppression.
Gaza’s Disappeared
The report shows 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:
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Gaza City: 1 million
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Mawasi: 0.5 million
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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.
Humanitarian Aid as Military Strategy
The second key finding of the report is that Israel’s so-called humanitarian aid compounds—constructed with U.S. support and operated in part by private American security firms—function not as relief centers, but as militarized zones that restrict access, surveil civilians, and enable violence.
These compounds are located in Israeli-declared “buffer zones” where civilians risk death for attempting entry. Their design funnels desperate Palestinians through chokepoints devoid of shade, water, or toilets—what the report identifies as a “fatal funnel” meant to control crowds, not serve them.
These installations stand in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which requires occupying powers to ensure food and medical supplies reach the civilian population, or allow independent humanitarian groups to do so. Instead, Israel has obstructed neutral aid groups and replaced them with a system that uses the language of humanitarianism to justify a regime of control and dispossession.
Repression at Home: Silencing Student Dissent
While Garb’s report meticulously documents atrocities abroad, a parallel strategy of repression has emerged within the borders of liberal democracies: the systematic persecution of student protestors who speak out against Israeli actions in Gaza.
On university campuses across the United States, Europe, and beyond, students demanding an end to the siege and accountability for war crimes are being surveilled, suspended, expelled, doxxed, and in some cases arrested. Faculty members who support these students have also faced retaliation, including denial of tenure, contract non-renewal, and public vilification.
Major donors and political actors have increasingly intervened in university affairs, pressuring administrations to equate protest with antisemitism, despite the fact that many of these student groups include Jewish activists and operate under clear human rights frameworks. What is being punished is not hate speech—but dissent.
University leaders, once guardians of free inquiry, now act as enforcers of ideological conformity, chilling debate and flattening moral nuance in the name of institutional stability. The persecution of protestors is not just a betrayal of academic freedom—it is a continuation of the same campaign of silence that allows mass death abroad to proceed without scrutiny.
The Disappeared, Here and There
In Gaza, the disappeared number in the hundreds of thousands. In the West, those who try to name this horror are disappeared in different ways: stripped of platforms, denied scholarships, pushed out of academic spaces. These twin silences—one enforced through military might, the other through institutional discipline—serve the same purpose: to protect power from accountability.
Dr. Garb’s report concludes with a searing indictment: “If an attacker (occupier) cannot adequately and neutrally feed a starving population in the wake of a disaster it is ongoingly creating, it is obligated to allow other humanitarian agencies to do so.” This obligation has not been met. Instead, it has been replaced by the architecture of impunity—built from rubble in Gaza, and maintained through repression in the halls of higher education.
If we fail to confront this architecture—if we allow it to be draped in the language of aid and the robes of civility—then we are complicit in its violence.
Primary Source:
Garb, Yaakov. 2025. The Israeli/American/GHF ‘aid distribution’ compounds in Gaza: Dataset and initial analysis of location, context, and internal structure. Harvard Dataverse. https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/QB75LB
With acknowledgments to 21st Century Wire and the journalists and students who refuse to be silent.
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