Brett Wilkins
Sep 24, 2025In his stirring final speech to a United Nations General Assembly, Colombian President Gustavo Petro on Tuesday called for an international armed intervention to end Israel’s nearly two-year genocide in Gaza.
“We need a powerful army of the countries that do not accept genocide,” Petro, who is in his last year in office and is limited under Colombian law to a single presidential term, told world leaders gathered in New York. “That is why I invite nations of the world and their peoples more than anything, as an integral part of humanity, to bring together weapons and armies.”
“We must liberate Palestine,” he asserted. “I invite the armies of Asia, the great Slavic people who defeated Hitler with great heroism, and the Latin American armies of Bolívar.”
“We’ve had enough words; it’s time for Bolívar’s sword of liberty or death,” Petro argued, referring to the 19th century Latin American independence hero Simón Bolívar.
How many deaths do you believe there have been? About what percentage of the total population of Gaza?
The current number listed by the Gaza health ministry is 60k, IIRC. That number is the best available. Sometimes they clean up the numbers and remove duplicates and such.
The real number could be higher, but at the moment nobody knows. The linked article has some anecdotal accounts about numbers of bodies recovered that were hidden under rubble before. These amount to a few thousand.
My guess is between 60 and 90 thousand deaths at most. That’s just a guess though. You will likely pull up the Lancet estimates, but they have methodological problems and are unlikely to be accurate. It was published under correspondence, the part of the Lancet that’s not peer reviewed. It was a letter to the editor.
Remember that on October 7th 2023 and the next day 1200 Israelis died over the course of just one day. That’s gunmen from Gaza armed with small arms mostly. The IDF has vastly more powerful weapons, but is nowhere near that number of killed Palestinians per day.
60k of 2 million are around 3%.
Too many Palestinians have died needlessly. Hamas should have surrendered or at least released the hostages 20 months ago. Israel and the international community should have done a lot differently as well.
The situation is horrible and needs to end.
Of course they do. No specific problems, no offer of some alternate attempt to estimate the total number of deaths, just “methodological problems” in general.
How’s this then?
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-committed-genocide-gaza-strip-un-commission-finds
Sounds about right. Your boys are doing a holocaust, the leaders need to face a trial and be hanged as soon as possible, and the systems of international law that failed to prevent it need to be rectified as soon as possible. “Never again” and all that. Ideally, a big chunk of Israel’s territory should be annexed to Palestine as reparations, the current residents should be upended to live wherever, and anyone who tries to resist that effort should face a firing squad. As should, ideally, any individual IDF member who can be shown beyond a reasonable doubt to have taken part in any particular part of the holocaust.