The Lancet Medical Journal has re-assessed the Palestinian death toll and found that more than 75,000 people were killed in the first 16 months of the two year war in Gaza – that’s 25,000 more than the initial toll announced by local authorities at the time.

The Guardian (19/2) reported that last month a senior Israel security officer had told Israeli journalists that the figures compiled by Gazan health authorities were broadly accurate – contradicting years of denial.

Research also found that the reporting by Gaza health authorities about the proportion of women, children and elderly people killed was accurate. A total of 42,200 women, children and elderly people died between October 7 2023 and January 2025.

A Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research estimated that there has been 78,318 people had been killed in Gaza between 7 October 2023 and 32 December 2024 and suggested that there was a much higher number of indirect deaths which contributed to a reduction of Gazan life expectancy by 44% in 2023 and 27% in 2024.

Al Jazeera reported (17/2) that Israeli military incursions and settler attacks forced more than 37,000 Palestinians to leave their homes in 2025.

Needless to say, the Israel lobby will dismiss what Al Jazeera has found but they can’t deny that the Israeli Government has approved a plan to designate large areas of the occupied West Bank as ‘state property’ shifting the burden of proof to Palestinians to establish ownership of the land.

12,557 were displaced from the Jenin refugee camp during Israeli military incursion; 20,805 from other refugee camps during Israeli military incursion.

The Israeli settler movement has also contributed to the ethnic cleansing campaign.  The number of settler attacks has risen sharply since 2016 with 852 recorded in 2022, 129, 2023, 1449 in 2024 and 1828 in 2025 - an average of five attacks per day.

Settlers are Israeli citizens living in illegal Jewish-only communities built on Palestinian -owned land that Israel occupied in 1967. The areas involved are increasing.

The 1993 Oslo Accords aimed to freeze settlement expansions and called for a mutually approved two-state solution.

But now about 10% of Israel’s Jewish population totalling - between 600,000 and 750,000 people - live in around 250 settlement and outposts dispersed throughout the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

As a result, the two state solution – if it was ever possible – has finally been put violently to an end.

Meanwhile, the US Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee has told podcaster Tucker Carlson (Guardian 21/2) that Israel has a biblical right to take over the entire Middle East according to interpretations of Old Testament scripture within the US Christian nationalist movement.

Carlson asked Huckabee about a biblical verse in which God promises Abraham that his descendants will receive land “from the wadi of Egypt to the great river the Euphrates – the land of the Kenites, Kennissites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizitties, Rephaites, Amorites, Cannanites, Gurgashites and Jebusites.”

It seemed God was gifting the entire Middle East – Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and big parts of Iraq and Saudi Arabia – to Israel.

It has to be said that Carlson – after being defenestrated from his TV spot - has increasingly questioned US support for Israel.

After reading it all it’s hard to work out who was more unhinged – Huckabee or Carlson. But then that may be a primary qualification for being part of a Trump Administration or a US shock jock.

Meanwhile back in Australia Israeli President, Herzog, scurried away early after visiting Melbourne.  Unlike the police violence in Sydney, the Victorian police were friendly, considerate and totally unthreatening.

Herzog may have been more comfortable with the NSW Police approach than the Victorian one.