Israel kills 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza; 16,000 victims are children

The war in Gaza has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, including at least 16,000 children and more than 11,000 women. Gaza’s Health Ministry announced the “grim milestone” on Thursday (15), a figure that is likely an underestimate, as most of the 10,000 missing Palestinians are believed to be buried under mountains of rubble.

“Can you imagine what 40,000 means? It’s a catastrophic number that the world cannot fathom,” Aseel Matar, a Palestinian woman in Gaza, told Al Jazeera.

“Despite this, the world sees, is aware, hears and observes us every day, every minute, but remains silent, and we are powerless. We are exhausted, we have no more energy.”

Shortly after the ministry’s announcement of the death toll, a new round of ceasefire talks aimed at ending the war began in the Qatari capital Doha on Thursday afternoon. Qatar, Egypt and the United States are mediating the high-stakes negotiations, with senior Israeli officials also in attendance.

The United Nations says Israel’s bombing has damaged or destroyed two-thirds of the buildings in the Gaza Strip.

“Today marks a grim milestone for the world,” said UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk. “This unimaginable situation is overwhelmingly due to repeated failures of [militares israelenses] in complying with the rules of war.”

Al Jazeera correspondent Hani Mahmoud, reporting from Deir el-Balah in Gaza, said the 40,000 figure was “a very conservative reading of the number of casualties in Gaza”.

“There are still those who are missing and trapped under the rubble, [que] have not yet been identified, have not been collected, have not been counted,” he said.

“There are those who are missing, whose relatives know nothing about their whereabouts. There are those who have been evaporated, given the intensity and scale of the bombs.”

Israel’s relentless campaign in Gaza, which has been the subject of allegations of genocide before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), has displaced more than 90 percent of the Strip’s population and created a humanitarian disaster, compounded by Israel’s widespread denial of essential humanitarian assistance in Gaza.

Despite the ICJ ordering Israel to allow aid into Gaza, July marked the lowest levels of aid entering the Strip since October 2023, when the war began following a Hamas incursion into southern Israel that killed more than 1,100 people, many of them Israeli civilians.

Amid deteriorating conditions, famine and deadly diseases such as polio spread across Gaza.

“We need a ceasefire, even if it is temporary, to successfully wage these campaigns. Otherwise, we risk the virus spreading further, including across borders,” said Hanan Balkhy, regional director of the World Health Organization (WHO).

The death toll given by the Health Ministry is conservative, with a study published in the medical journal The Lancet in July saying the number could be as high as 186,000 people, a figure that would represent around 8% of Gaza’s entire population.

Israeli forces have targeted schools, aid workers, medical facilities and UN shelters throughout the war, including some hosting large numbers of displaced people. Israel claims that such facilities are used by Hamas for military purposes, but these claims are often lacking evidence.

In the first 10 days of August, Israel attacked at least five schools in Gaza, killing more than 150 people.

Reports of abuses committed by Israeli forces, such as systematic torture, extrajudicial executions, and destruction of civilian infrastructure, agricultural land, and religious and cultural sites, were also frequent during the war.

The war was also the deadliest in modern history for journalists, with the Committee to Protect Journalists stating that 113 media professionals have been killed since the war began, 108 of them Palestinians.

With Israel barring foreign journalists from entering the Gaza Strip, Palestinian reporters have been facing grueling conditions and the danger of Israeli attacks to document the conditions of civilians in Gaza.

The US has played a central role in the war, with massive arms transfers funding Israel’s campaign despite reports of rampant violations of international law. The Biden administration announced last week that it had cleared an additional $20 billion in arms sales to Israel.

“There is such an erosion of the very foundations of international law,” Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, told Al Jazeera.

“This system [de direito internacional] “The International Criminal Court was born after the Second World War to prevent and punish atrocities like this, especially to prevent. So it failed. But it also tells us that there is a huge hypocrisy in the system, because a few powerful states have the ability to determine to whom international law can be applied, and to whom it cannot, and Israel is in the latter category. This is unacceptable,” she said.

Via News Agencies