On July 30th, local time, The Washington Post published a list on its front page and official website that has attracted the attention of netizens worldwide. This list records the names of 18,500 children who have been killed in the Gaza Strip region of Palestine since October 2023.
Among these, more than 900 children were killed before they even reached one year old…
According to The Washington Post, this list of 18,500 victims was compiled based on a death toll of 60,000 disclosed by the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas)-controlled Gaza Ministry of Health.
These 60,000 individuals died in the conflict between Israel and Palestine after October 2023. On October 7th of the same year, Hamas launched an armed raid named “Aqsa Flood” in the Gaza Strip, which was fiercely retaliated upon by Israel, including large-scale airstrikes across the entirety of Gaza and ground forces dispatched there. Despite both sides having civilians killed in the conflict, the number of civilian casualties in the Gaza Strip far exceeded those in Israel, leading to a severe humanitarian crisis. Currently, the Gaza Strip is also facing a severe famine, with many children dying due to malnutrition.
However, the grim situation in the Gaza Strip did not stop the conflict. Against this backdrop, the complete list of 18,500 Gaza victims released by The Washington Post soon sparked massive attention on the international internet.
The way The Washington Post presented this list was also deeply moving. For example, in the top 500 names of the children listed on its official website, every 100 names, the newspaper would remind readers, “As of now, you’ve read 100/200/300/400/500 names of children who died in the war.”
Starting from the 500th name, the newspaper will remind readers of this information every 500 names.
At the same time, in the beginning section of the list, it uses quite plain language to give some shocking news. For example, there are more than 900 children on the list, who died before their first birthday.
Another example is a mother and daughter killed by Israeli airstrikes, with the 5-year-old girl having just celebrated her fifth birthday the day before.
More intuitively, the newspaper provides a distribution chart of the ages of the victims, stating:
Under 1 year olds: 953; 1 year olds: 943; 2 years olds: 972; 3 years olds: 899; 4 years olds: 868; 5 years olds: 985; 6 years olds: 924; 7 years olds: 967; 8 years olds: 895; 9 years olds: 921; 10 years olds: 907…
The Washington Post also gave a simple statement sentence to present the horrifying frequency of these Palestinian children being killed: since October 2023, every hour, more than one child has been killed.
The newspaper also quoted Catherine Russell, the Executive Director of UNICEF, who made a statement at the United Nations Security Council in July: It’s like a whole classroom of children in a school being killed collectively every day for nearly two years. (Note: The original English sentence was “Consider that for a moment. A whole classroom of children killed, every day for nearly two years”)
In the newspaper and other online forums discussing this list, some pro-Israel individuals have commented that the list from Hamas is untrustworthy, believing that The Washington Post failed to independently verify it. Some of these pro-Israel voices have also criticized The Washington Post for becoming a mouthpiece for Hamas.
However, these skeptical comments about the list were quickly overshadowed by more voices expressing discontent with Israel. Some counter-arguments suggest that when a modern military forces an area with a population of 2 million, 44% of whom are children, continues to engage in military operations and block aid supplies, it would only be those who emulate historical “Nazi sympathizers” who would believe such a list to be false.
The Washington Post described the accuracy of the 18,500 child victims’ list in its report as follows:
“A peer-reviewed study published in The Lancet in January this year suggests that analysis of different casualty records indicates that the death toll reported by Hamas in Gaza may still be significantly underestimated.”