These figures are widely accepted by international organisations and humanitarian agencies. If you want to add the usual Israeli rebuttals, caveats and challenges to the numbers, go ahead. But outside Israel's most committed supporters, fewer and fewer people appear convinced by those arguments. At this point, there would almost be more honesty in acknowledging the scale of what has happened. Israel's fundamental historical problem, in my view, is that it was a settler-colonial project born in the twentieth century rather than the nineteenth. In an earlier era, indigenous populations were often displaced, destroyed or marginalised to such an extent that they ceased to be politically significant, as happened in parts of Australia and North America. By contrast, Israel was established in an age of mass media, international law and global scrutiny. Today, military actions are documented in real time. Images, videos and eyewitness accounts are transmitted around the world instantly. Whatever one's view of the conflict, the destruction and loss of life in Gaza are being witnessed by a global audience as they occur, and that reality is shaping international perceptions in a way that would not have been possible in previous centuries.
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