The carnage in Gaza is even worse than we thought as the number of victims continues to soar.
The Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza reports that the death toll has surpassed 15,200 and that 70% of those killed were women and children.
The figure was announced Saturday by ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qidra, who did not provide further details.
That figure is 2,000 more than was previously believed to be the case as of Saturday. The reason for the sudden jump is not completely clear but the ministry has only been able to provide sporadic updates since Nov. 11, amid problems with connectivity and major war-related disruptions in hospital operations.
In addition, more than 40,000 people have been wounded, al-Qidra said.
After a weeklong truce with Hamas, Israel renewed intense attacks on Gaza, despite severe admonishments from the United States to do everything possible to protect civilians.
“This is going to be very important going forward,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Friday after meetings with Arab foreign ministers in Dubai, wrapping up his third Middle East tour since the war started. “It’s something we’re going to be looking at very closely.”
Axios reports on Saturday that Biden told Netanyahu that the way Israel operated in northern Gaza, which included a wide assault and three armored and infantry divisions, can’t be repeated in the southern part of the enclave because of the millions of Palestinians who are there now, the U.S. officials said.
President Biden is not alone in warning Benjamin Netanyahu about sparing the lives of civilians, in the past week Pope Francis has become embroiled in a dispute about whether he used the word genocide to describe Israel’s relentless attack on the civilian population of Gaza.
“This is what wars do,” the Pope had said at his general audience in St. Peter’s Square on Wednesday. “But here we have gone beyond wars. This is not war. This is terrorism.”
Israel rejects these figures provided and claims that the Health Ministry in Gaza is inflating the numbers, and especially those of women and children that were killed. Indeed, Israel blames Hamas for the casualties and essentially considers them mere collateral damage: “The death of any civilian during a war is tragic, but in the case of Israel’s attacks on Hamas, such deaths are inevitable since Hamas facilities and leaders hide behind civilians and under schools and hospitals. Hamas fighters block civilians from evacuating”. The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs goes as far as calling the number of victims a scam.
Once the truce ended, Israel’s attacks on Saturday were focused on the Khan Younis area in southern Gaza, where the military said it had struck more than 50 Hamas targets with airstrikes, tank fire and its navy.
The IDF military claims to have dropped leaflets the day before warning residents to leave but, as of late Friday, there had been no reports of large numbers of people leaving, according to the United Nations.
“There is no place to go,” lamented Emad Hajar, who fled with his wife and three children from the northern town of Beit Lahia a month ago to seek refuge in Khan Younis.
“They expelled us from the north, and now they are pushing us to leave the south.”
Israel’s military said it also carried out strikes in the north and hit more than 400 targets in all across the Gaza Strip.
Some 2 million people — almost Gaza’s entire population — are crammed into the territory’s south, where Israel urged people to relocate at the war’s start and has since vowed to extend its ground assault. Unable to go into north Gaza or neighboring Egypt, their only escape is to move around within the 220-square-kilometer (85-square-mile) area where there is no escape from the relentless assault of Israeli rockets and bombs.
Since the resumption of hostilities, no aid convoys or fuel deliveries have entered Gaza, and humanitarian operations within Gaza have largely halted, according to the U.N.
