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In a war marked by one calamity after the other, we have a new grim milestone. On Thursday, the Gaza Health Ministry announced that the enclave’s death toll amid the ongoing Israeli offensive against militant group Hamas had surpassed 40,000 people. That statistic is grim in its own right, though implicit in it, too, is the staggering scale of destruction in Gaza — the quantifiable damage unleashed by Israel’s relentless bombardments of the territory and the unquantifiable toll of misery and suffering experienced by a hungry population, struggling for safety in a Gaza where no area seems safe.
The statistic also comes with a cavalcade of caveats. It’s generated by a health ministry in Gaza that’s run by the territory’s reeling Hamas-led government and therefore, in the eyes of many, immediately suspect. The death toll figure does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. And the intensity of the conflict since Oct. 7, when Hamas launched its terrorist strike on southern Israel, has meant that independent verification of the data has been impossible. Some rights groups contend that the health ministry’s number is an undercount, while Israel and its boosters often downplay the figures.
“At times, Israeli officials have accused Palestinians of exaggerating the civilian toll,” my colleagues noted. “In July, however, the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement that about 14,000 militants had been ‘eliminated or apprehended,’ meaning combatants potentially make up less than half of those killed. The Israeli military did not provide evidence.” The IDF on Thursday updated its estimate to 17,000 militants, though it did not explain how it calculated the new figure.
As my colleagues outlined, previous conflicts in Gaza have shown that the local health ministry’s casualty counts have been broadly reliable. Researchers publishing in the Lancet, the respected British medical journal, found little evidence of any track record of inflated numbers from Gaza’s health authorities. Before the medical system in the territory effectively collapsed amid Israel’s military campaign, local officials published multiple lists of the dead and vetted cases of people reported dead by family members.
“The information we have for this conflict is much better than probably all of the most recent high-profile conflicts,” Michael Spagat, an economics professor at the University of London who studies casualties in armed conflicts, told my colleagues, gesturing to the numbers circulating ongoing wars in Ukraine, Ethiopia, Syria and Sudan.
Displaced Palestinians plead for peace ahead of Gaza cease-fire talks in Qatar on Aug. 15, as the death toll reaches 40,000, the local Health Ministry said. (Video: Reuters)
Both U.N. and local officials contend that the bulk of the dead are women and children. “Do you know what it means to lose 40,000 of your people? It means that 40,000 women, children, young people, adults and elderly people will no longer be there. The children will never grow up. They will never go to school or university. Women will not give birth and will not be there to hold their children,” said Fikr Shalltoot, Gaza director for the Britain-based Medical Aid for Palestinians relief group, to my colleagues.
Volker Türk, the U.N.’s human rights chief, echoed the sentiment in remarks Thursday. He pointed to myriad violations of international humanitarian law by both parties in the conflict, but singled out the Israeli military as the key driver of Palestinian suffering. “This unimaginable situation is overwhelmingly due to recurring failures by the Israeli Defense Forces to comply with the rules of war,” he said in a statement. “On average, about 130 people have been killed every day in Gaza over the past 10 months. The scale of the Israeli military’s destruction of homes, hospitals, schools and places of worship is deeply shocking.”
The Lancet’s peer-reviewed research suggested earlier this year that the real toll in Gaza is far higher. They noted in July that the deaths of as many as 186,000 Palestinians in Gaza — close to a tenth of the population — could be attributable to the current conflict, pointing to thousands of bodies still lying under the rubble and the lethal toll of malnutrition and disease taking its grip on the territory.
Rosemary DiCarlo, U.N. under-secretary-general for political affairs, briefed the Security Council on Tuesday in the aftermath of another mass casualty event in Gaza, when bombs struck a school housing thousands of displaced Palestinians, killing more than 100 people, including many children. “No place is safe in Gaza, yet civilians continue to be ordered to evacuate to ever shrinking areas,” she said, reiterating the “desperate need to reach a cease-fire, free the hostages and scale up humanitarian aid.”
Talks over a cease-fire are once again underway in Doha, the Qatari capital. Top Israeli and U.S. officials convened with Qatari and Egyptian interlocutors in the hopes of a breakthrough that has so far eluded the region’s diplomats. Looming in the background was the threat of military action by Iran and its lead Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, against Israel, in supposed “revenge” for the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. That attack may be delayed for diplomacy to continue — or perhaps for Iran, which is wary of a full-scale escalation with Israel, to save face.
“We can say that Hezbollah will not launch its retaliation operation during the Qatar talks because the party does not want to be held accountable for obstructing the talks or a potential deal,” said an individual with close ties to Hezbollah, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief the media, to my colleagues. “The retaliation can wait; it is not urgent or has a time limit.”
Meanwhile, in the West Bank, vigilante Jewish settlers descended on a Palestinian village, torching homes and killing at least one person in a brazen raid. The incident was condemned by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but reflects the extremism of a settler movement emboldened by Netanyahu and his far-right allies. As tens of thousands perished in Gaza, Israel has stepped up its de facto capture of Palestinian land in the West Bank.
“The government has approved strategic land seizures — almost 6,000 acres this year alone — and major settlement construction, escalated demolition of Palestinian property and increased state support for illegally built settler outposts,” my colleagues charted in a detailed assessment of settler encroachment published Thursday.
“While the Biden administration insists that any diplomatic solution to the war in Gaza include a path to an independent Palestinian state,” my colleagues added, “radical Jewish settlers and their far-right political backers, who have ascended to the highest levels of Israel’s government, are redrawing the map in real time — making the two-state solution envisaged in past peace accords effectively impossible.”