By Usaid Siddiqui
Mass graves, crippled hospitals, thousands of civilian deaths and near total destruction of infrastructure haunt Gaza as Israel’s war on the besieged Palestinian coastal enclave entered its 200th day on Tuesday.
Israel launched its brutal military offensive on October 7 after a deadly attack by Hamas fighters. About 240 people were taken captive in southern Israel and 1,139 were killed by the Palestinian fighters. Nearly 85 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been displaced and more than 14,000 children have been killed in the offensive, which critics have called a war of vengeance.
Here are some numbers that highlight the unprecedented level of violence used in the past six months while Israel remains adamant about launching a ground offensive in Rafah. The southernmost city in Gaza is sheltering 1.5 million Palestinians, most of whom fled earlier phases of the war.
34,000 killed
According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, at least 34,183 people have been killed and 77,084 have been wounded in Israeli attacks.
About 72 percent of those killed are women and children, according to an update by Gaza’s Government Media Office on Tuesday.
On Monday, United Nations human rights chief Volker Turk said a child in Gaza is killed or wounded “every 10 minutes”.
Meanwhile, 7,000 people are missing, according to the Government Media Office, many presumed dead under the rubble.
“We have seen death over the last 200 days at an unprecedented scale,” said Emily Tripp, director of the London-based nonprofit Airwars, which tracks casualties in aerial bombardments during war. “We have now identified more incidents where civilians have been killed since October 7 in Gaza than we did in eight years of the US and allied campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
“We have documented strikes where more than 100 people have been killed – and the news barely reaches international headlines,” she told Al Jazeera.
In a report published in late March, Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, said there were clear indications that Israel has violated three of the five acts listed under the UN Genocide Convention.
These acts Albanese said were “killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to the group’s members; and deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”.
62 percent of homes destroyed
Many residential areas across Gaza have been destroyed and ruined by relentless bombing. At least 75,000 tonnes of explosives have been dropped on Gaza by Israeli forces, according to the Gaza media office.
This month, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, also known as UNRWA, said 62 percent of all houses in the besieged territory have been damaged or destroyed.
Nearly 90,000 housing units have been destroyed while nearly 300,000 units have been damaged by the Israeli air and ground offensive, according to the Gaza media office.
A World Bank and UN report published on April 2 said the cost of damage to critical infrastructure in the first four months of Israel’s war is estimated at $18.5bn.
1.1 million people facing ‘catastrophic’ lack of food
About 1.1 million people — half of Gaza’s pre-war population — are living through catastrophic food insecurity, the world’s hunger watchdog, known as the Integrated Food-Security Phase Classification (IPC), said in a report published on March 18.
Catastrophic food insecurity, the IPC’s worst level of food insecurity, refers to conditions in which starvation and acute malnutrition are evident.
In northern Gaza, famine is likely to occur by May and could spread across the enclave by July, the report added.
According to the IPC, famine is defined as when at least 20 percent of households are facing an extreme lack of food, at least 30 percent of children are suffering from acute malnutrition and at least two adults or four children for every 10,000 people are dying every day from outright starvation or a combination of malnutrition and disease.
The Gaza media office on Tuesday said at least 30 children have died “as a result of famine”. It said 1.09 million people have been infected with diseases as a result of being displaced in the coastal enclave.
Moreover, the war in the coastal enclave has hampered the work of aid agencies such as UNRWA.
The UN has said more than 200 aid workers have been killed during the war, most of them Palestinians.
As of March 16, UNRWA said at least 180 of its staff have been killed since October 7.
26 hospitals destroyed and hundreds of medics killed
Israeli forces have repeatedly targeted hospitals in the Gaza Strip, including besieging some of its biggest health facilities.
World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on March 30 said only 10 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals were “minimally functional”.
Tlaleng Mofokeng, the UN special rapporteur on the right to health, on Monday said at least 350 healthcare professionals have been killed since October 7 with 520 wounded, adding that the numbers were “grossly underreported”.
Mofokeng said Israel’s war in Gaza has from the start been a “war on the right to health” and has “obliterated” the health system in the coastal enclave.
The Gaza media office on Tuesday said 485 medical staff have been killed since the war began.
“The destruction of healthcare facilities continues to catapult to proportions yet to be fully quantified,” Mofokeng, a doctor from South Africa, said.
In recent months, some of Gaza’s most renowned health facilities were besieged by Israeli forces. Last week, nearly 300 bodies were retrieved from a mass grave found inside Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis weeks after Israeli forces withdrew.
This month, bodies were also uncovered at Gaza City’s al-Shifa Hospital, which was besieged by Israeli forces for weeks.
Four UN resolutions calling for ceasefire vetoed
The United States has vetoed UN Security Council resolutions calling for ceasefire on three occasions since October 7 while a fourth truce resolution was blocked by Algeria, Russia and China.
On March 23, the three countries vetoed a US-drafted resolution, which Moscow said was a “hypocritical spectacle” that did not pressure Israel.
On March 25, the US decided not to veto a ceasefire resolution by abstaining from the vote. The resolution called for an immediate ceasefire for the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. Israel has failed to stop its war despite the resolution.
The US has consistently backed Israel at the UN while also supplying a major chunk of weapons to the country. The US House of Representative approved $26bn in aid to Israel at the weekend. The legislation is now being considered by the Senate.
SOURCE: AL JAZEERA
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