Palestinian death toll passes 65,000 as Israel steps up attacks on Gaza City
A bomb flies in the air moments before destroying a building during an Israeli military strike in Gaza City (Yousef Al Zanoun/AP)
The Palestinian death toll in the Israel-Hamas war has surpassed 65,000 as Israeli troops and tanks pushed deeper into Gaza City and residents fled the devastated area.
Israel’s military said that air force and artillery units had struck the city over 150 times in the last few days, ahead of ground troops moving in.
The strikes have toppled high-rise towers in areas densely populated by tent camps where thousands of Palestinians are sheltering. Israel claims the towers are being used by Hamas to monitor troops.
Overnight strikes killed at least 16 people, including women and children, hospital officials reported.
The death count in Gaza has reached 65,062, with another 165,697 wounded, since Hamas’s October 7 2023 attack, according to the Health Ministry, which is part of the Hamas-run government.
Israel’s offensive has destroyed vast areas of Gaza, displaced around 90% of the population and caused a catastrophic humanitarian crisis, with experts announcing famine in Gaza City.
The ministry does not say how many of the dead were civilians or militants. Its figures are seen as a reliable estimate by the UN and many independent experts.
Meanwhile, Palestinians streamed out of the city — some by car, others on foot. Israel opened another corridor south of Gaza City for two days beginning on Wednesday to allow more people to evacuate.
More than half of the Palestinians killed in overnight Israeli strikes were in famine-stricken Gaza City, including a child and his mother who died in their apartment in the Shati refugee camp, according to officials from Shifa Hospital, which received the casualties.
In central Gaza, Al-Awda Hospital said an Israeli strike hit a house in the urban Nuseirat refugee camp, killing three, including a pregnant woman. Two parents and their child were also killed when a strike hit their tent in the Muwasi area west of the city of Khan Younis, said officials from Nasser Hospital, where the bodies were brought.
The Gaza Health Ministry said that multiple Israeli strikes hit the Rantisi Hospital for children in Gaza City on Tuesday night. It posted pictures on Facebook showing the damaged roof, water tanks and rubble in a hospital hallway.
The ministry said the strikes forced half of the patients to flee the facility. About 40 patients, including four children in intensive care and eight premature babies, remained in the hospital with 30 medical workers, the ministry said.
“This attack has once again shattered the illusion that hospitals or any place in Gaza are safe from Israel’s genocide,” said Fikr Shalltoot, Gaza director for the aid group Medical Aid for Palestinians.
The Israeli military said it was looking into the strikes but in the past it has accused Hamas of building military infrastructure inside civilian areas.
The military’s Arabic-language spokesman, Avichay Adraee, wrote on social media that a new route opened for those heading south for two days starting at noon on Wednesday.
But many Palestinians in the north were cut off from the outside world. The Palestinian Telecommunications Regulatory Authority, based in the occupied West Bank, said Israeli strikes on the main network lines in northern Gaza had collapsed internet and telephone services on Wednesday morning. tried unsuccessfully to reach many people in Gaza City.
An estimated one million Palestinians were living in the Gaza City region before warnings to evacuate began ahead of the offensive, and the Israeli military estimates 350,000 people have left the city. The UN estimates that more than 238,000 Palestinians of some one million believed living in the city have fled northern Gaza over the past month. Hundreds of thousands more have stayed behind.
A coalition of leading aid groups has urged the international community to take stronger measures to stop Israel’s offensive on Gaza City. It came a day after a commission of UN experts found Israel was committing genocide in the Palestinian enclave. Israel denies the allegation.
“What we are witnessing in Gaza is not only an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe, but what the UN Commission of Inquiry has now concluded is a genocide,” read the statement from the aid groups. “States must use every available political, economic, and legal tool at their disposal to intervene. Rhetoric and half measures are not enough. This moment demands decisive action.”
The war in Gaza began when Hamas-led militants stormed into southern, killing around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting 251 others. Forty-eight hostages, fewer than half believed to be alive, remain in Gaza.
