According to a new report in Haaretz by Nir Hasson, as the death toll in Gaza reaches 40,000, it's time to face facts: "the numbers show" that the Gaza war is "one of the bloodiest in the 21st Century."

For many who hear this claim, its veracity will seem obvious. For nearly a year, the world has been consumed by this war. There must be a reason. Surely the absolute numbers justify the riots, the self-immolations, and the accusations of that most vile crime against humanity - genocide.

But reading the report, one sees how quickly it disproves its own claims. Let's look at the numbers, cited by Hasson himself:

In Syria, 405,000 dead.

In Iraq, 210,000 dead.

In Yugoslavia, 100,000 dead.

In Ukraine, 172,000 dead.

All of those numbers appear to be much higher than 40,000, so how is Haaretz claiming that this is one of the deadliest conflicts of the century? Well, they don't go by absolute numbers. Instead, they go by pace and by percentage of population.

40,000 is 2% of Gaza's population, and this number of fatalities has occurred in less than a year.

The Syrian war also claimed the lives of 2% of the population, but took 13 years.

The Iraq war claimed the lives of 1% of the population, but took 20 years.

The Ukraine war has only claimed the lives of .45% of the population, in 2.5 years.

This is not usually how we evaluate the size of a war. But it is how we evaluate the size of this war. In December, the Washington Post called the war "one of this century's most destructive," again citing pace rather than absolute numbers. It is as if these reporters are starting with the assumption that the Gaza war is the worst in recent history, and then working backwards to find out how.

But beyond this dishonest analysis, it's unclear what exactly they are implying. Is a war that lasts decades better than one that lasts a year? Is it less "bloody" or "destructive"?

After all, everyone knows that the war in Gaza won't last for two decades like America's wars. Israel is already winding down in Gaza, and while Netanyahu and Gallant may bicker over the exact nature of the end, we all know that it's going to end, and that the lion's share of the IDF's mission in Gaza is done. As for percentage, where did we get 2%?

40,000 is 2% of Gaza's population, but there are also millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and as far as I know, every Palestinian from Gaza and the West Bank considers themselves to be a single people.

So yes, 2% of the residents of the region held by Hamas have died in this war. In fact, nearly half of them were Hamas themselves. But it's not true that 2% of the Palestinian population has died. Far from it.

If this is how people want to analyze this war, so be it, but let's be fair and let both sides use the same metrics. For instance, on October 7th, around 70,000 people lived in the region of Israel known as the Gaza Envelope. By nightfall, 1.7% of them had been slain by merciless invaders.

None of this is to say that 40,000 is a small number. Indeed, reporters ought to be curious about why this number is as high as it is, considering Israel's well-documented efforts to minimize civilian casualties.

There are a number of reasons. For one, generally, when there is a war, people are allowed to flee to safer areas. Palestinians are not. The Egyptians have sealed their border with little to no international scrutiny or condemnation. As for "safe zones" within Gaza, Hamas has a habit of taking them over and turning them into battlefields.

When Mohammad Deif was killed by an Israeli strike, many were outraged that the strike was in a so-called "safe zone." They should have been outraged that Hamas' second-in-command was in a "safe zone" to begin with when he knew that his presence rendered the area a legitimate military target.

There are other ways in which Hamas guarantees civilian deaths. For instance, not wearing uniforms so as to confuse between the civilian population and combatants; or using hospitals as bases; or UN buildings, or hiding Israeli hostages in dense urban areas. People would rather blame Israel. For instance, in January, the Washington Post called the displacement of Gazans "the largest displacement in the region since 1948."

But it's not. Not even close. 1.9 million people live in Gaza. 13 million were displaced by the Syrian civil war. 4 million in Yemen. 9 million in Iraq. So why claim that this is the largest displacement? And why say "since 1948"? Simple: to make it seem like the existence of Israel is the problem. None of this is to minimize the devastating tragedies caused by this war, or the horrifying situation in the Gaza strip.

Yesterday, I saw a gut wrenching video of a Palestinian man whose wife and newborn twins had died in an Israeli airstrike. There is no quantifying such grief and I pray, for his sake and for others like him, that this war ends speedily with a deal that brings the hostages home.

But the world is insisting that Israel is bloodthirsty - that it is doing something other than what any country would do after suffering the kind of invasion that Israel suffered on October 7th.

This isn't true, and despite what Haaretz says, it's not "what the numbers show."

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When he first heard that US troops had toppled Saddam Hussein, Iraqi engineer Hazem Mohammed thought he would finally be able to find his brother, who had been shot dead and dumped in a mass grave after a failed uprising against Saddam's rule in 1991.

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It wasn't just Mohammed's hopes that were raised after the US-led invasion in March 2003. Relatives of tens of thousands of people who were killed or disappeared under the dictator believed they would soon find out the fate of lost loved ones.

Video: Reuters

Twenty years later, Mohammed, who was hit by two bullets but survived the mass killing in which his brother perished, and countless other Iraqis are still waiting for answers.

Dozens of mass graves were found, testimony to atrocities committed under Saddam's Baath Party. But work to identify victims of historic killings has been slow and partial in the chaos and conflict engulfing Iraq in the past two decades.

"When I saw how mass graves were being opened, randomly, I decided to keep the location of the grave secret until a stronger state would be in place," Mohammed said.

As exhumations dragged on, more atrocities were committed in sectarian conflict and amid the rise and fall of armed groups, such as Al Qaida and Islamic State militants, as well as Shi'ite Muslim militias.

Today Iraq has one of the highest numbers of missing persons in the world, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which says estimates of the total range up to hundreds of thousands of people.

It was another 10 years before Mohammed led a team of experts to the site where he, his brother, and others were rounded up as Saddam's troops crushed a mainly Shi'ite uprising at the end of the 1991 Gulf War. At the time, they were forced to their knees next to trenches summarily dug in the outskirts of the southern city of Najaf, and shot. Tens of thousands of Iraqis were killed by Saddam's forces during his rule.

The remains of 46 people were exhumed from the site, now surrounded by farms, but Mohammed's brother was never found. He believes more bodies are still there, unaccounted for.

"A country that is not dealing with its past will not be able to deal with its present or future," he said. "At the same time, I sometimes forgive the government. They have so many ... victims to deal with."

Painful progress

According to the Martyrs Foundation - a governmental body involved in identifying victims and compensating their relatives - over 260 mass graves have been unearthed so far, with dozens still closed. But resources are limited for such a huge task. In a section of the ministry of health in Baghdad, a team of about 100 people processes remains from mass graves, one site at a time. The department head Yasmine Siddiq said they have identified and matched DNA samples of around 2,000 individuals, out of about 4,500 exhumed bodies.

Lining the shelves of her storage room were remains of victims from the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war - skulls, cutlery, a watch, and other items that might help identify victims. The forensic efforts are complemented by archivists studying stacks of documents from Saddam's Baath Party, which was disbanded after his overthrow, for the names of missing persons yet to be identified.

Mehdi Ibrahim, an official at the Martyrs Foundation, said that each week his team identifies about 200 new victims. The names are published on social media. So far the foundation has processed about half of the 1 million documents in its possession, just a fraction of Iraq's scattered archive. Most Baath Party-era documents are held by the government, while others were destroyed after the invasion.

Some atrocities are more quickly examined than others. According to Siddiq, massacres committed by Islamic State militants, who seized much of northern Iraq in 2014 and held it for three violent years, have been prioritized.

The highest identification rate for victims was achieved for an incident known as the Camp Speicher massacre by Islamic State, a mass shooting of army recruits. "Most families declared their missing ones and most bodies had been retrieved," Siddiq said.

The Martyrs Foundation says the killings resulted in about 2,000 martyrs, including 1,200 killed and 757 who remain missing. In Sinjar, where Islamic State committed what U.N. investigators described as genocide against Iraq's Yazidi minority, about 600 victims have been reburied, with some 150 identified.

Other disappearances remain unexplored. In Saqlawiya, a rural area near the Sunni town of Falluja, families are losing hope of discovering the fate of more than 600 men captured when the area was retaken from Islamic State by security forces. Shi'ite militiamen seeking vengeance against Islamic State rounded up Sunnis from the town of Saqlawiya, according to witnesses interviewed by Reuters in 2016, U.N. workers, Iraqi officials, and Human Rights Watch.

From her living room in Saqlawiya, furnished with just a carpet and a thin mattress, Ikhlas Talal wept as she scrolled through pictures of her husband and 13 other male relatives who disappeared in early June 2016.

'We are not a priority'

Talal did not want to describe the men in uniform who took them away, fearing retribution. But she and other women from the neighborhood have searched for their husbands, fathers, and sons for years, traveling across Iraq and contacting prisons and hospitals – all in vain.

"The Iraqi government must take all steps to locate the disappeared and to hold the perpetrators accountable," said Ahmed Benchemsi of Human Rights Watch.

The Martyrs Foundation and Iraq's Interior Ministry did not respond to requests for comment on the Saqlawiya case. Abdul Kareem Al-Yasiri, a local PMF commander whose unit is based currently near Saqlawiya, denied the PMF had any role in the disappearance of people from the area in the war with IS.

"These accusations are baseless and politicized to smear our troops and we reject them," he said, adding that he believed IS was behind the disappearances. Talal is seeking to have her husband officially recognized as a martyr so she could claim a monthly pension of $850.

"We are not a priority," she said, surrounded by half a dozen children who she barely manages to feed with the assistance of local NGOs and small-scale farming. Questions remain even over the better-reported incidents. Majid Mohammed last spoke to his son, a combat medic, in June 2014 before the Camp Speicher massacre. His name was not among the hundreds of victims identified by Siddiq's team, and Mohammed remains in limbo. His wife Nadia Jasim said successive governments had failed to address the enforced disappearances.

"All Iraqi mothers' hearts are broken because of their sons who disappeared," she said. "With all the time that passed since 2003, we should have found a solution. Why are people still disappearing?"

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Colin Powell, the son of Jamaican immigrants who rose to become the first black US secretary of state and top military officer but whose reputation was tainted in 2003 when he touted spurious intelligence to the United Nations to make the case for war with Iraq despite deep misgivings, died on Monday at the age of 84.

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Despite being fully vaccinated against COVID-19, his family said, he died due to complications from the disease.

Powell was one of America's foremost black figures for decades. He was named to senior posts by three Republican presidents and reached the top of the US military as it was regaining its vigor after the trauma of the Vietnam War.

Powell, who was wounded in Vietnam, served as US national security adviser under President Ronald Reagan from 1987 to 1989. As a four-star Army general, he was chairman of the military's Joint Chiefs of Staff under President George HW Bush during the 1991 Gulf War in which US-led forces expelled Iraqi troops from neighboring Kuwait.

Powell, a moderate Republican and a pragmatist, considered a bid to become the first black president in 1996 but his wife Alma's worries about his safety helped him decide otherwise. In 2008, he broke with his party to endorse Democrat Barack Obama, who became the first black person elected to the White House.

Powell will forever be associated with his controversial presentation on Feb. 5, 2003, to the UN Security Council, making President George W Bush's case that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein constituted an imminent danger to the world because of its stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.

He admitted later that the presentation was rife with inaccuracies and twisted intelligence provided by others in the Bush administration and represented "a blot" that will "always be a part of my record."

Bush had picked Powell, the top US military officer during his father's presidency, as secretary of state in 2001.

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The United States is returning more than 17,000 ancient artifacts looted and smuggled out of Iraq after the US invasion in 2003, including a 3,500-year-old clay tablet bearing part of the Epic of Gilgamesh, Iraq said on Tuesday.

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Tens of thousands of antiquities disappeared from Iraq after the 2003 invasion that toppled leader Saddam Hussein. Many more were smuggled or destroyed by the iconoclastic Islamic State, which held a third of Iraq between 2014 and 2017 before it was defeated by Iraqi and international forces.

Video: Reuters

US authorities working to recover the artifacts recently reached an agreement with Baghdad to return items seized from dealers and museums in the United States, the Iraqi culture and foreign ministries said.

"The US government seized some of the artifacts and sent them to the (Iraqi) embassy. The Gilgamesh tablet, the important one, will be returned to Iraq in the next month after legal procedures are finalized," Culture Minister Hassan Nadhim told Reuters.

US authorities seized the Gilgamesh tablet in 2019 after it was smuggled, auctioned and sold to an arts dealer in Oklahoma and displayed at a museum in Washington, DC, the Department of Justice said. A court ordered its forfeiture last month, it said.

It said that a US antiquities dealer had bought the tablet from a London-based dealer in 2003. The Epic of Gilgamesh is a 3,500-year-old Sumerian tale considered one of the world's first pieces of literature.

Nadhim said other artifacts being returned included other tablets inscribed in cuneiform script.

Iraq's ancient heritage has been decimated by conflict, destruction and looting especially since 2003. Thousands of artifacts are still missing.

After 2014, Islamic State, which preached an intolerant and extremist interpretation of Islam, raided and wrecked historical sites on what UNESCO called an "industrial" scale, using loot to fund its operations through a smuggling network extending through the Middle East and beyond.

With the help of international agencies, Iraqi authorities have been trying to track down, return and preserve its archaeological relics.

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His son-in-law Frédéric Salat-Baroux said that Chirac died Thursday "peacefully, among his loved ones." He did not give a cause of death, though Chirac had had repeated health problems since leaving office in 2007.

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Chirac was long the standard-bearer of France's conservative Right and mayor of Paris for nearly two decades. He was nicknamed "Le Bulldozer" early in his career for his determination and ambition. As president from 1995 to 2007, he was a consummate global diplomat but failed to reform the economy or defuse tensions between police and minority youths that exploded into riots across France in 2005.

Under his presidency, France entered into the single European currency and abolished compulsory military service. Chirac also cut the presidential term of office from seven to five years.

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Isaiah Joel Peoples, 34, faces eight counts of attempted murder for injuring eight people, including four who remain hospitalized. He is being held without bail.

The most seriously injured is a 13-year-old Sunnyvale girl of South Asian descent who is in a coma with severe brain trauma.

His family says Peoples, a former U.S. Army sharpshooter, experienced post-traumatic stress disorder after serving in Iraq. Peoples' attorney, Chuck Smith, says the crash was in no way deliberate.

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