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A Calculated Deluge: The Arithmetic of Annihilation in Gaza

 



Let’s talk numbers.
Not the kind that anesthetize, but the kind that sear.
The kind that, when faced honestly, strip away the rhetoric and lay bare the machinery of destruction.


The Source

This is not rumor.
This is not speculation.

On July 12, 2024, Martin Griffiths—the UN’s Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs—stood before the Security Council and said the words in cold, diplomatic tone:

“According to our colleagues at UNOSAT, Israel’s military operations have rained down 100,000 tonnes of explosives on Gaza in the first six months of the war.”

One. Hundred. Thousand. Tonnes.
A number so monstrous it dissolves into abstraction—unless we force it into meaning.


What 100,000 Tonnes Looks Like

  • Per Person: 43.5 kg of explosives for every man, woman, and child in Gaza.
    A family of five? A 200 kg package of deathtwo full-grown gorillas made of TNT—delivered to their doorstep.

  • Per City Block: 455 tonnes per square kilometer.
    Imagine your neighborhood. Now imagine 45 dump trucks, each carrying 10 tonnes of explosives, parked bumper-to-bumper down every single street—and then detonated.

  • The Benchmark: Hiroshima’s bomb had a yield of 15,000 tonnes.
    Gaza has endured the equivalent of six Hiroshimas, not in a single instant, but as a half-year-long storm of fire unleashed on a trapped civilian population.

This is not collateral damage. This is calculated arithmetic.


The Supply Chain of Destruction

This scale of carnage does not happen in a vacuum.
It requires factories, cargo ships, signatures, authorizations.

And it has them.

  • The Supplier: The United States of America.
  • The Process: Billions in military aid. Emergency waivers. Shipments fast-tracked past Congress.
  • The Proof: Serial numbers stamped onto bomb fragments, traced back to U.S. factories.
  • The Shield: Vetoes at the UN Security Council, speeches about Israel’s “right to defend itself,” and silence about the rubble.

Every detonation in Gaza carries the echo of an American assembly line.


The Heaviest Question

We have the math.
We have the sources.
We have the photographs.

So history will ask us:

What did we do when we saw 100,000 tonnes of explosives used against a civilian population?

Did we learn that our laws are meaningless?
That our institutions are hollow?
That some lives are disposable, their killers untouchable?



Or—
Will we learn that “Never Again” is indivisible?
That accountability cannot be selective?
That those who supply and shield mass violence share in its crime?


The statistics are already carved into Gaza’s rubble.
The only question left is:

What will be carved into our conscience?



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