June 30, 2024
Protesters gathered to demonstrate against Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip and the Biden Administration’s military support for Israel’s military offensive in Los Angeles, California on 02 March 2024 [David McNew/Getty Images]
Lawmakers in the United States this week voted to prevent the government from citing the death toll of Palestinians in Gaza killed by Israel, in the latest effort to directly censor facts and criticism of the occupation and its war crimes.
In a 269 – 144 vote in favour of the bipartisan amendment at the US House of Representatives, the move attempts to bar the State Department from using international affairs budget funds to cite figures and statistics published by Gaza’s Health Ministry, essentially censoring any mention of the number of Palestinians that Israel has killed in the besieged Strip since the beginning of its ongoing nine-month-long offensive.
Having overwhelmingly been voted in and being backed by 62 Democrats and 207 Republicans, the proposed amendment is now set to go to the Senate for consideration.
If passed, the US government will be forbidden from acknowledging that the Israeli occupation has killed at least 37,765 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and wounded 86,429 others so far. Those statistics by Gaza’s health ministry are also suspected of far underestimating the true number of deaths and injuries, primarily due to the fact that Israeli forces have significantly impacted the ministry’s capabilities to count such figures.
The vote has been condemned by many observers and critics who insist that it only aims to further censor facts relating to the scale of Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. One of those critics is Palestinian-American congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who stated in a speech to the House ahead of the vote that since 1948, “there has been a coordinated effort, especially in this chamber, to dehumanise Palestinians and erase Palestinians from existence”.
She stressed that her “colleagues want to prohibit our own US officials from even citing the Palestinian death toll”, highlighting that fact that six children are killed in Gaza every hour. “But Palestinians are not just numbers. Behind these numbers are real people—mothers, fathers, sons, daughters who have had their lives stolen from them and their families torn apart, and we should not be trying to hide it”.
Tlaib condemned the “anti-Palestinian racism in this chamber”, emphasising that her fellow lawmakers “don’t even want to acknowledge that Palestinians exist at all. Not when they’re alive, and now, not even when they’re dead. It’s absolutely disgusting. This is genocide denial.”
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