The Demographic Destruction of the Palestinians: Births, Deaths & War By Numbers.

The importance of demography in warfare has long been understood & exploited by enemies during both peacetime and war, and the long running Israeli-Palestinian conflict is no different.

Peter Winn-Brown
11 min readMay 16, 2024
Hungry Palestinians including children hold empty bowls for scraps of food in Gaza this week.
Hungry Palestinians hold out bowls for scraps of food in Gaza just this week. Image from NYT, Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters.

“I think, the call of Rabbis for Ceasefire is …rooted in a Torah of life. We were talking before about, sort of, uses of Torah that are violent. I think our primary, um, core anchoring Torah itself is the idea that ‘pikuach nefesh,’ (saving a soul) this rabbinic obligation to save a life above all else, is the call of the moment. And so the call of the moment is that ceasefire is immediately, urgently necessary, right now, today, every hour, to save as many lives as possible, right now. And that it is also urgently necessary for the future, because every day without a ceasefire pushes us further and further and further into an even more entrenched and impossible future. So ‘pikuach nefesh’ is for now and for the future. And as part of that sort of call to life is also the idea that every human being is created in God’s image, and that what we are witnessing, that is a desecration of God’s image. And that October 7th was a desecration of God’s image, and then we have seen an unthinkable, an unthinkable…

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Peter Winn-Brown
Peter Winn-Brown

Written by Peter Winn-Brown

The past can illuminate the present if we shine the light of inquiry openly, truthfully, with attention to detail & care for the salient facts.