While many are earnestly pointing at the devastation of war, the rampant human rights violations and the deliberate relegation of international and humanitarian law, there are those who see war from an entirely different perspective: profits.
For the merchants of war, the collective pain and misery of whole nations is dwarfed by the lucrative deals of billions of dollars generated from weapons sales.
The great irony is that some of the loudest advocates of human rights are, in fact, the ones who are facilitating the global arms trade. Without it, human rights would not be violated with such impunity.
The Geneva Academy, a legal research organization, says that it currently monitors about 110 active armed conflicts worldwide. Most of these conflicts are taking place in the Global South, though many of these cases are either exacerbated, funded or managed by western powers or western multinational corporations.
Of the 110, 45 armed conflicts are taking place in the Middle East and North Africa region, 35 in the rest of Africa, 21 in Asia and six in Latin America, according to the Academy.
The worst and bloodiest of these armed conflicts is currently taking place in Gaza, one of the poorest and most isolated regions in the world.
To estimate the future death toll resulting from the war in Gaza, one of the world’s most respected medical journals, the Lancet, undertook a thorough research entitled “Counting the dead in Gaza: Difficult but essential”.
The approximation was based on the death toll figure produced as of June 19, when Israel had then reportedly killed 37,396 Palestinians.
Lancet’s new number was horrifying, even though the medical journal said that its conclusions were based on conservative estimates of indirect deaths vs direct deaths that often result from such wars.
Should the war end today, meaning June 19, 7.9% of the population of the Gaza Strip will die because of the war and its aftermath. That’s “up to 186,000 or even more deaths”, according to the Lancet.
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