Michael Alton

West Country lad. 30 years Tory, now very much a Reform voter, though taking a long hard look at Restore. Support Israel action to eliminate Hamas. 🇮🇱

[Michael Alton @MichaelElton2]

@Chris_Taylor72 @TranmereRovers That made me laugh, though they seem to know a route to the onion bag. Still. Bring it on!!

[Chris Taylor @Chris_Taylor72]

I've never had that we are a tough fan base, have a go & give everything you've got that's all we ask, the SWA were unbelievable yesterday, the players battled for their lives & the away end was rocking, when the fans & the team are together this club is frightening SWA

[Michael Alton @MichaelElton2]

@LeeAndersonMP_ @reformparty_uk

[Michael Alton @MichaelElton2]

@Chris_Taylor72 @LeagueOne25 What's happened Chris? Other than signing for the Notlobs?

[Andrew Fox @Mr_Andrew_Fox]

Remember: genocide means a deliberate attempt to exterminate a group, simply for being members of that group. That’s what “genocide in Gaza” alleges: that Israel is unsuccessfully attempting to exterminate every last Palestinian.

Now, stand fast the fact that the only really high rate of Gazan deaths happened in the first months of the war and dropped to barely registering after the ceasefire (see graph below). One might suggest that had Israel been intent on wiping out everyone indiscriminately, they would have maintained their rate of killing.

But what about the overall population of Gaza? If Israel had wanted to wipe out every Palestinian, you’d expect that overall total to fall, right?

At some point, the word genocide has to survive contact with arithmetic. Gaza’s own records now sit in open contradiction with the claim that Israel attempted to destroy its population: approximately 121,000 live births since 7 October 2023, against a reported direct war death toll of just over 73,000.

The extermination narrative looks increasingly absurd. More babies have been born in Gaza during the war than Gazans have been recorded as killed, including both civilians and combatants.

The usual escape route is to say that genocide need not succeed. That is legally correct and intellectually evasive when deployed to make every contrary fact disappear. Genocidal intent still has to be proved, and the ICJ has held that, where it is inferred from conduct, the destruction of the group must be the only reasonable inference available.

In Croatia v Serbia, it examined whether civilians had been spared, evacuated or allowed to survive when their supposed destroyers had the opportunity to kill them. Conduct preserving members of the protected population counted against genocide.

Now apply that reasoning to Gaza.

Start with polio. In September 2024, while Israeli troops were still fighting across the Strip, Israel agreed daily, area-specific pauses so Palestinian and international medical teams could vaccinate Gaza’s children. The first round reached 559,161 children under ten, around 95 per cent of the eligible population.

Israel then agreed to do it again. The second round reached 556,774 children, with 448,425 children between two and ten also receiving vitamin A. The campaign required the delivery of 1.6 million vaccine doses, refrigerators, freezers, ice boxes and hundreds of vaccine carriers. WHO and UNICEF planned for the vaccines and cold-chain equipment to transit through Ben Gurion Airport before entering Gaza.

A third campaign followed in February 2025. It vaccinated 602,795 children under ten, reaching 102 per cent of the estimated target because medical teams found children missed during earlier rounds.

The combined figure is 1,718,730 administered polio doses. (That represents repeated protection of roughly 600,000 individual children, rather than 1.7 million different children.) Almost the entire under-10 population was reached again and again.

These vaccines were administered by Palestinian health workers, WHO, UNICEF, UNRWA and their partners. Without Israeli cooperation, the campaigns could not have happened.

UNICEF’s end-of-year report says the outbreak had been interrupted by July 2025. It also records 49,000 children under two receiving catch-up vaccinations, with coverage exceeding 80 per cent. BCG vaccinations rose from 37,471 in 2024 to 47,556 in 2025.

It was an enormous public health enterprise, run over several months, involving thousands of workers and protecting nearly every child in Gaza from paralysis.

That is the physical reality of what Israel enabled: the children it was supposedly trying to destroy were repeatedly protected against a disease that could disable or kill them.

A coherent programme of genocide cannot be inferred by treating every Israeli action that preserved Palestinian life as irrelevant.

The birth figures deepen the problem for the accusation. A reconstruction using Gaza Ministry of Health and civil registration records suggests approximately 12,000 babies were born during the final quarter of 2023, around 38,000 during 2024, 49,267 live births during 2025, and roughly 21,000 so far in 2026. The latest portion is necessarily estimated because complete July and August registrations have not yet been published.

Many babies born during the first months had been conceived before 7 October. That explanation expired nine months into the war. Tens of thousands of children were subsequently conceived and delivered while Israel supposedly pursued the biological destruction of Gaza.

Births fell below their pre-war level, hardly surprising amid displacement and combat. Miscarriages, premature births and maternal complications also rose. Nothing about those conditions was humane or desirable.

However, the comparison remains devastating. Approximately 121,000 live births against just over 73,000 reported direct war deaths leaves a difference approaching 48,000. The number killed includes combatants as well as civilians, of course.

Gaza’s overall resident population fell because the calculation includes outward migration, the missing and other demographic changes. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics estimates that around 100,000 people left Gaza during the war. A decline driven substantially by people leaving a war zone cannot simply be relabelled as physical destruction.

No Israeli advocate needs to pretend that civilian life in Gaza was tolerable. It was an urban war fought against an enemy dug into hundreds of miles of tunnels beneath neighbourhoods, hospitals, schools and camps. Hamas designed that battlefield to make civilian deaths unavoidable and politically useful.

Israel issued evacuation warnings, created corridors and humanitarian zones, admitted food and medicine, coordinated medical evacuations, paused military operations and enabled almost 600,000 Palestinian children to receive repeated protection against polio. Around 121,000 babies were born during the war, far exceeding the reported direct death toll.

The genocide allegation survives only by declaring every piece of exculpatory evidence meaningless. Births supposedly tell us nothing. Vaccinations tell us nothing. Food deliveries tell us nothing. Humanitarian pauses tell us nothing. Failed famine predictions tell us nothing. The absence of measured famine mortality tells us nothing.

Such reasoning insulates the genocide accusation from reality. Every Palestinian death becomes proof of genocide, while every Palestinian life preserved through Israeli cooperation is dismissed as public relations.

The simpler explanation: Israel fought a devastating war against Hamas, accepting extraordinary military and political costs while repeatedly undertaking measures to preserve Palestinian civilian life. Those measures were imperfect and sometimes failed, as measures do in war.

Gaza’s own birth records, vaccination figures and famine evidence have hollowed out the allegations. A country attempting to destroy a people does not enable more than 120,000 births, facilitate 1.7 million childhood vaccine doses and support humanitarian operations feeding virtually the entire population.

That is war, with all its brutality and tragedy. It is not genocide.

[Michael Alton @MichaelElton2]

@JuliaHB1 If the right* win the next General Election, will the Police follow the political doctine of the new Government with as much vim & vigour they have done for the last 16 years.

*Clarification. The Tories are not 'the right'.

[Michael Alton @MichaelElton2]

@TroupyTRFC @TranmereRovers Bore off

[Michael Alton @MichaelElton2]

@FightFists The walk on by, or worse, film and harrangue culture of Moghadishu is withering.

....I mean 'our strength'.

[Michael Alton @MichaelElton2]

@Chris_Taylor72 @Cwhitaker_10 One of the few players I hope we retain Chris.

[Chris Taylor @Chris_Taylor72]

@narindertweets I'm what you would call far right, I'm 50 something, bald with a beer belly & I vote reform, most summers I holiday in Turkey I listen to the call to prayer & love it, I see their flags & I'm not offended because it's their Country it's what they do & that's fine

[Michael Alton @MichaelElton2]

@JuliaHB1 Not helped of course that you have to follow the cretinous shock jock Jeremy Kyle (quite what @TalkTV were thinking of in scheduling terms remains a mystery) - so we all now follow Nick Ferrari for a higher level of debate. Time to leave?

[Michael Alton @MichaelElton2]

@JuliaHB1 Having followed you from the start - there has been a gradual decline in your level of output on @TalkTV insofar as more and more of the callers are Union Jack T-Shirt wearing loud mouths that break down a complex debate to, "boot 'em all out".1/2

[Michael Alton @MichaelElton2]

@Realaldo474 . Vacant Tranmere job John? We'd have you back in a heartbeat. Please think about it....? 🙏🙏🙏

The SWA

[Michael Alton @MichaelElton2]

@BurnsideWasTosh Just thinking. Whilst there are bombs, rockets and missiles flying around in the Middle East, how is me drinking through a soggy paper straw at McDonalds, going to save the planet?

[Michael Alton @MichaelElton2]

@Carol4OliveFarm @EmmanuelMacron @Keir_Starmer I know you're not a fan of the Jews Carol, but do you think WW2 was justified in saving those people from the gas chambers - or should we have just joined hands and sang Cum-Bah-Ah into the faces of the Nazi's. I mean - that approach 'could' have worked?

[Michael Alton @MichaelElton2]

@BurnsideWasTosh I roadied for them at The Tivoli, Buckley in '88. Halcyon days.

[Michael Alton @MichaelElton2]

@Chris_Taylor72 @TranmereRovers Great maisy run for goal Chris. And our new keeper pulled off some worldies. Feet on ground, but quietly hopeful!

[Michael Alton @MichaelElton2]

@Realaldo474 Aldo - fave player of all time.

[Michael Alton @MichaelElton2]

@zarahussain999 @barton71 Speak for yourself.

[Michael Alton @MichaelElton2]

@misosoop511 @Lailafatimeh