“To speak of three million years of human life erased is to confront the true scale of this atrocity – generations of children, parents, and families wiped out,” said the head of a US advocacy group.

As Israeli forces continued to  violate a fragile ceasefire agreement with  Hamas,  killing more people in the Gaza Strip on Monday, the largest Muslim  civil rights group in the  US renewed calls for cutting off military aid to  Israel, citing a new  study in The Lancet.

“This new Lancet study offers more evidence of the catastrophic human cost of Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people,” Council on American-Islamic Relations national executive director Nihad Awad said in a statement.

The  correspondence published on Friday by the famed British medical journal was submitted by Colorado State University professor  Sammy Zahran, an expert in health economics, and Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a British Palestinian surgeon teaching at the American University of  Beirut in  Lebanon.

Zahran and Abu-Sittah provided an estimate of the number of years of life lost, based on an official death toll list published by the  Gaza Ministry of Health at the end of July, which included the age and sex of 60,199  Palestinians. They noted that the list is “restricted to deaths linked explicitly to actions by the Israeli military, excluding indirect deaths resulting from the ruin of  infrastructure and medical facilities, restriction of  food and  water, and the loss of medical personnel that support life".

The pair calculated life expectancies in the state of Palestine — Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem — by sex for all ages, using mortality and population data from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs for 2022. They estimated that a total of 3,082,363 life-years were lost in Gaza as a result of the Israeli assault since 7 October 2023.

“We find that most life-years lost are among civilians, even under the relaxed definition of a supposed combatant involving all men and boys of possible conscription age (15-44 years),” the paper states. “More than one million life-years involving children under the age of 15 years… have been lost.”

CAIR’s Awad said, “To speak of three million years of human life erased is to confront the true scale of this atrocity – generations of children, parents, and families wiped out. It is a deliberate effort to destroy a people.”

Israel faces a  genocide case at the  International Court of Justice over its conduct in Gaza, and the  International Criminal Court last year  issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister  Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant.

“The US and the international community must end their complicity by halting all military aid to Israel and supporting full accountability for these crimes under international law,” Awad argued.

A report  published last month by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the Costs of War Project at Brown University found that the Biden and Trump administrations provided at least US$21.7 billion in military aid to Israel since the start of the war.

Federal law prohibits the US Government from providing security assistance to foreign military units credibly accused of human rights abuses.  The Washington Post last week  reported on a classified State Department document detailing “many hundreds” of alleged violations by Israeli forces in Gaza that are expected to take “multiple years” to review.

With President  Donald Trump seeking a  Nobel Peace Prize, the US helped negotiate the current ceasefire, which began on 10 October, after more than two years of devastating retaliation for the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel. The head of Gaza’s Government Media Office  said on Monday that Israeli forces have committed at least 194 violations of the agreement.

As of Sunday, the ministry’s death count was at 68,865, with at least 170,670 people wounded. Previously published research, including multiple studies in The Lancet, has  concluded that the official tally is likely a  significant undercount.

Republished from Common Dreams, 3 November 2025

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