Suffering written in disappearing ink
It was just over a month ago that Hamas terrorists broke through the Gaza border with Israel and massacred 1,200 Israeli citizens, the vast majority of them civilians. The news, like lava flowing from a volcano, consumes dead bodies; it consumes mass graves; it consumes whole cities that lie in ruins after months of constant bombardment. The inexorable movement of the news is forever away from the volcano of what has happened.
Since Oct. 7, the news has moved on from the villages, kibbutzim and military outposts in Israel where all those people were killed, some of them burned beyond recognition. Others were children murdered in front of their parents; some were parents murdered in full view of their children, before they, too, were murdered or taken hostage.
Now the news gives us daily totals of the civilian casualties within Gaza. The total number of casualties stands today at 11,000, including just over 4,000 children. The burning viscous flow of the news will cover that number one day soon, just as it has covered the number of civilians dead and dying in Ukraine, which as of September of this year, 18 months since the start of Russia’s invasion, is 9,614, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). Other outlets put the number much higher. Ukraine’s leading war crimes prosecutor, Yuriy Belousov, told The Independent earlier this year, “There could be 100,000 civilians killed across Ukraine, whose bodies will have to be found and identified once occupied territory is liberated.”
He could be right. Do you remember the name, Bucha? It is a Ukrainian village near Kyiv. In April of 2022, shortly after Russian forces were driven back from the area around Kyiv, evidence of a massacre was discovered by Ukrainian soldiers. According to the Ukrainian government, 458 bodies were found in Bucha after the Russians left the town, including nine bodies of children. According to OHCHR, March of 2022 was the deadliest month for civilians in Ukraine, with 4,168 killed and 3001 injured.
How about the town of Izium? In September of 2022, several mass graves were discovered in the forest near Izium. According to Ukrainian authorities, graves containing at least 440 bodies were discovered at one site near Izium. A few days later, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced that two more mass graves had been discovered containing “hundreds of people.” Zelenskyy later told the press that as many as 1,000 Ukrainians may have been massacred by Russian soldiers in Izium before Ukraine re-took the town in its September 2022 offensive.
Do you remember the Russian airstrike on Mariupol that hit a maternity hospital? I wrote about it at the time, but I had to look it up to remember that it happened on the 9th of March in 2022.
