Tucked into a $895 billion Pentagon bill making its way through Congress is a little-noticed provision to further conceal the death toll in Gaza — the latest effort by U.S. policymakers to cast doubt on casualty figures reported by Palestinian health officials.
The House approved this year’s National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, on Wednesday and sent it to the Senate for a vote, despite Democratic objections over a GOP proposal to prohibit transgender children on military health insurance from receiving gender-affirming care.
The death toll provision of the must-pass bill, which passed 281-140 with 81 Democratic votes, has received significantly less attention. It would bar the Pentagon from publicly citing as “authoritative” casualty data from the Gaza Health Ministry, effectively concealing the full extent of the death toll in Gaza in the military’s public communications. The data from Palestinian authorities has been the only consistent and reliable count of the death toll out of Gaza over the last 14 months, with Israel consistently denying human rights workers access to the enclave and preventing foreign media journalists from entering.
“This is an alarming erasure of the suffering of the Palestinian people, ignoring the human toll of ongoing violence,” said Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., in a statement to The Intercept.
The provision does not explicitly cite the Gaza Health Ministry; instead, it says that the Pentagon cannot “cite as authoritative in public communications, fatality figures that are derived by United States-designated terrorist organizations, governmental entities controlled by United States-designated terrorist organizations or any sources that rely on figures provided by United States-designated terrorist organizations.”
Still, the target is clear. Politicians in the United States have repeatedly cast doubt on the numbers provided by the Gaza Health Ministry because it falls under the jurisdiction of Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. Earlier this year, the House of Representatives passed legislation explicitly prohibiting the State Department from citing data from the Gaza Health Ministry. And President Joe Biden previously told reporters that he had “no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using,” despite his own State Department reliably using those numbers for years.
International human rights bodies, including the United Nations, have long relied on the data from the Gaza Health Ministry and considered it credible and in line with their own findings.
“In the past, the five, six cycles of conflict in the Gaza Strip, these figures were considered as credible, and no one ever really challenged these figures,” the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees chief, Philippe Lazzarini, told reporters at a press conference last year.
The NDAA rider extends the prohibition to any sources that rely on Health Ministry data, which includes most leading human rights organizations and the United Nations.
The legislation comes shortly after Amnesty International declared that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, noting as a factor in their decision the immense death toll in the besieged Strip. In the first year of Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza, the military had killed 44,835 people in Gaza, according to the Health Ministry.
Now, the legislation will move to the Democratic-controlled Senate, likely for a vote next week. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has already come out in opposition, arguing that at a time when Americans are struggling paycheck to paycheck, Congress should not be giving a $900 billion handout to the military-industrial complex.
“We do not need a defense system that is designed to make huge profits for a handful of giant defense contractors while providing less of what the country needs,” said Sanders on the Senate floor on Wednesday. “We do not need to spend almost a trillion dollars on the military, while half a million Americans are homeless, children go hungry, and elderly people are unable to afford to heat their homes in the winter.”
