Lawmakers in the USA 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 favor of the bipartisan amendment at the female dominated US House of Representatives, the move attempts to bar the State Department, 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 deadly bloody 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 invasion and 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.
Now more secret assassinations can freely follow. 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 dehumanize 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.
Middle East Monitor / ABC Flash Point News 2024.
This opens the door to multiply the deadly onslaught in Gaza and West Bank. At the same time the main weapons supplier can was their hands clean for the time being?
Everyone around the world is having their mouths duct taped shut with high price duct tape when they don’t lick the crap off of Israels *sshole.
US govt doesn’t want the real truth of Israel’s genocide saturating the minds of average Americans. Understandable when the US govt is complicit in the number of deaths being reported. Unfortunately for them, they no longer have a monopoly on the flow of information. People who really want to know the death toll numbers can still find it on the internet.
I think for current historical perspectives, Palestinians are trying, against all odds, to oust the army that’s been invading and attacking their country since, what, 1947? An invasion which sadly has been aided & abetted by my own country, & many others. Remember, “Israel”, as a state, is merely an ad hoc creation of a group of power grabbers that began around WW1, who felt supporting such an aggressive, tiny state, would be of financial & political benefit to themselves. Seemingly, they still suffer from this delusion, even in 2024. I am ashamed of my own species for this behavior.