Omer Bartov is an Isareli-American professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He has issued a grim warning on Gaza

Want to know a fun fact about Palestinians? They’re hard to kill. You can bomb them, bury them under rubble, burn them alive and they still don’t seem to die at the rates of normal people. How else do you explain the fact the death count in Gaza barely seems to budge, even though not a day seems to go by without another new massacre and with starvation and the spread of disease only getting worse?

A staggering 43,000 dead Palestinians. That’s the official number the most recent coverage cites. That’s when a number is cited at all: many pieces on Gaza don’t even mention the death count anymore.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian US columnist