Devastating Milestone: Gaza Health Ministry Reports Over 70,000 Killed in Israeli Offensive

 

The human cost of the conflict in Gaza has reached a devastating new milestone, with the territory's Hamas-run health ministry announcing that more than 70,000 Palestinians have been killed since the start of the Israeli military offensive. This staggering figure underscores the catastrophic scale of the crisis, even as a fragile ceasefire is technically in effect.

According to the Gaza Ministry of Health (MoH), the official death toll now stands at 70,100. Tragically, over 350 of these fatalities have occurred since the ceasefire, brokered by the United States, took effect on October 10th. The continuing rise in casualties is attributed both to ongoing Israeli air strikes—which Israel asserts are responses to truce violations—and the grim, protracted process of recovering and identifying bodies from under the massive amounts of rubble left by weeks of heavy bombardment.

Ongoing Casualties Despite the Truce

The persistent danger faced by Gaza's civilian population was tragically highlighted by an incident on Saturday. In a reported Israeli drone strike, two young brothers, Fadi and Juma Abu Assi, were killed. Relatives stated that the children, an eight-year-old and his brother, aged 10 or 11, were gathering firewood east of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip when the strike occurred. Their funeral was held later that day at Nasser Hospital.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) confirmed they had carried out a strike in the area, stating they had targeted "two suspects who had crossed the so-called yellow line." This "yellow line" marks the agreed-upon boundary to which the Israeli military was mandated to withdraw under the terms of the ceasefire, which was established more than seven weeks ago. The disparity between the IDF's statement of targeting "suspects" and the family's account of two young boys gathering fuel for fire highlights the immense difficulty in verifying facts on the ground.

Data Reliability and Verification Challenges

Throughout the conflict, the figures published by the Gaza Ministry of Health have been the primary measure of Palestinian casualties. These figures have been widely used and are generally considered reliable by major international organisations, including the United Nations (UN) and other international institutions.

However, the validity of the data has been consistently disputed by Israel, which argues the numbers are inflated or unreliable due to the Hamas administration of the ministry.

A critical challenge to independent verification exists due to the restrictions on access: international journalists, including those from the BBC, are blocked by Israel from entering Gaza independently. This restriction prevents major news outlets from conducting their own, on-the-ground verification of casualty figures from either side, necessitating reliance on the competing claims of the warring parties or the data collected by local authorities and aid agencies.

The Israeli military campaign in Gaza was launched in direct response to the massive cross-border attack led by Hamas on southern Israel on October 7, 2023. That initial assault resulted in the deaths of approximately 1,200 people and the taking of 251 others as hostages, fundamentally shattering the precarious calm that preceded the current conflict.