More than 60,000 people killed in Gaza war, local health officials say

Boston Globe

5 days ago

The ministry has recently begun reporting a separate toll: the growing number of deaths from hunger after months of Israeli aid restrictions raised the threat of mass starvation. More than 130 people have died of hunger, most of them in recent weeks, according to the Health Ministry. More than 1,000 have been shot waiting for aid, most in the scramble to reach
first-come,
first-served food distributed at points located inside Israeli military zones.
Gaza as it was before the war — a tiny but bustling territory with high-rises, universities, and seaside cafes — no longer exists. Entire cities have been reduced to rubble. The highways have been excoriated, exposing the sand beneath. Most of the population has been pushed into the 12 percent of the enclave that Israel has not ordered evacuated, and diseases such as polio and meningitis have emerged.
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'The scale of human suffering and the stripping of human dignity have long exceeded every acceptable standard — both legal and moral,' Mirjana Spoljaric, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said in a statement Friday. 'Every political hesitation, every attempt at justification of the horrors being committed under international watch will forever be judged as a collective failure to preserve humanity in war.'
In a statement Tuesday, the ministry said 60,034
people had been killed and another 145,870
injured since the start of the war on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas fighters attacked southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking about 250 others back to Gaza as hostages.
Since then, the Gaza Health Ministry has provided near-daily updates on casualties from the conflict and released multiple spreadsheets listing the names, ages, and identification numbers of the majority of the dead. Some remains have yet to be identified, health officials say, and an estimate of the number of bodies still under the rubble stands at roughly 10,000, according to Health Ministry and UN figures.
The Israeli military does not provide regular updates for its own assessment of how many Palestinians have been killed. In January, outgoing chief of staff Herzi Halevi said that the Israel Defense Forces had 'eliminated close to 20,000 Hamas operatives.' On Monday, the IDF spokesperson's unit said that 20,000 was the most recent number the military has 'addressed on the record.' The military did not say how it reached that figure.
On its latest spreadsheet released in June, the Gaza Health Ministry recorded at least 1,860 deaths of children under the age of 2 since the start of the war. In more than 2,600 families, all of the immediate family members have been killed, according to Zaher al-Waheidi, head of the ministry's records department.
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Israel and Hamas agreed to a cease-fire in January, described by the US officials who helped negotiate it as a stepping stone to a lasting peace. Over the next two months, the fighting stopped, relief flowed to Gaza, and both Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners were released in choreographed exchanges.
But when the time came to negotiate the second phase of the agreement, which Hamas hoped would see a full withdrawal of Israeli forces, Israel refused to participate and imposed a blockade of all food, aid and fuel to Gaza. About two weeks later, it resumed military operations there.
Talks between Israel and Hamas broke down again last week. President Trump said Friday that Hamas 'didn't want to make' a deal; Hamas said that its latest response through Egyptian and Qatari mediators was close to a US-proposed agreement on how to end the war. Hamas continues to hold about 50 hostages, according to Israeli authorities, roughly 20 of whom are believed to still be alive.