200 Days of Israel’s War on Gaza, Here are 5 Facts

GAZA – Mass graves, crippled hospitals, thousands of civilian deaths and destroyed infrastructure haunt Gaza as Israel wars on the coastal territory Palestine the besieged entered its 200th day on Tuesday (23/4/2024).

Israel launched its brutal military offensive on October 7 after a deadly attack by Hamas fighters. About 240 people were taken prisoner in southern Israel and 1,139 were killed by Palestinian fighters. Nearly 85 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents have been displaced and more than 14,000 children have been killed in the offensive, which critics have called a war of revenge.

Here are some figures that highlight the unprecedented level of violence in the past six months, while Israel persisted in launching a ground offensive on Rafah. Gaza’s southernmost city is home to 1.5 million Palestinians, most of whom fled the early stages of the war.

200 Days of Israel’s War on Gaza, Here are 5 Facts

1. 34,000 killed

Photo/AP

According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, at least 34,183 people were killed and 77,084 injured in the Israeli attacks.

About 72 percent of those killed were women and children, according to the latest information from the Gaza Government Media Office on Tuesday.

On Monday, UN human rights chief Volker Turk said a child in Gaza was killed or injured “every 10 minutes”.

Meanwhile, 7,000 people are missing, according to the Government Media Office, many thought to have died under the rubble.

“We have seen deaths over the last 200 days on an unprecedented scale,” said Emily Tripp, director of the London-based nonprofit Airwars, which tracks casualties from aerial bombing during the war. “We have now identified more incidents in which civilians were killed since October 7 in Gaza than we have in the entire eight-year campaign of the US and its allies against ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

“We have documented an attack that killed more than 100 people – and it barely made international headlines,” he told Al Jazeera.

In a report published in late March, Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, said there were clear indications that Israel had violated three of the five acts listed in the UN Genocide Convention.