25,000 Palestinians Killed by Israeli Strikes Since October 7

TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - The toll of Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes on the Gaza Strip since hostilities between Israel and Hamas escalated in October 2023 has passed 25,000, Gaza health officials said on Sunday.

Gaza's health ministry said 178 Palestinians were killed on Sunday, one of the deadliest days of the war so far. Israel's military said a soldier was killed in fighting.

A total of 25,105 Palestinians - many of them women and children - have been killed and 62,681 have been wounded in Israeli strikes since Oct. 7, the ministry said in a statement.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on Sunday denounced Israel for what he called the "heartbreaking" deaths of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

"Israel's military operations have spread mass destruction and killed civilians on a scale unprecedented during my time as secretary-general," Guterres said at a summit in the Ugandan capital Kampala.

Despite the huge death toll, the Israeli military has said it takes steps to avoid civilian casualties. Still, it accuses Hamas of operating in densely populated areas and using civilians as human shields, a charge the resistance group has denied.

Most of the enclave's 2.3 million people have been displaced from their homes. With large areas of the Gaza Strip razed to the ground and hospitals and humanitarian agencies struggling to cope, Palestinians described dire conditions.

"We struggle to survive bombs, but frankly we try to survive hunger more. Finding food for the family and children has become a more challenging adventure than surviving war," Amer, aged 32, a father of three from northern Gaza, told Reuters. The man sent his texts using eSIM, the only hope for Palestinians to connect themselves to the outside world amid ongoing communication blackout. 

The price of flour, for example, has surged along with other food items that are hard to come by in the already impoverished territory.

"Amid the famine threatening residents of northern Gaza, the people began to grind what is available to make flour, starting with corn and reaching to animal food," Anas Al-Sharif, a Palestinian freelance journalist reporting from northern Gaza, posted on X.

Palestinians said fierce fighting has raged in Jabalia for the past three days. The noise of shelling from the air and the ground was non-stop, they said. Some buildings caught fire and smoke rose where bombs had fallen.

Along Gaza's southern coast, witnesses said Israeli naval vessels shelled the beach.

In the southern city of Rafah, where more than a million displaced people are concentrated, three Palestinians were killed in an Israeli air strike on a car. Another car was hit in Gaza City, killing three people, health officials said.

Violence has also surged in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where Hamas's rival the Palestinian Authority has limited self-rule. The Palestinian Health Ministry there said Israeli forces have killed 360 Palestinians since Oct. 7.

REUTERS

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