Death toll passes 7,000 in Gaza war — health ministry

GAZA STRIP, Occupied Palestine — The health ministry in Gaza said on Thursday that at least 7,028 people have been killed in Gaza by Israeli strikes since October 7.

Some 2,913 children and 1,709 women are among the dead, marking the highest number of war fatalities in Gaza since Israel unilaterally withdrew from the territory in 2005.

In southern Gaza, a bereaved Palestinian, Umm Omar Al Khaldi, recounted to AFP how she witnessed her neighbours being killed in an Israeli strike that reduced the house to rubble, with many feared buried beneath.

“We saw them getting bombarded, the children got bombarded while their mother was hugging them,” the woman said, desperately pleading for help from the outside world.

“Where are the Arabs, where is humanity?” she said. “Have mercy on us, have mercy on us.”

The war’s surging death toll is by far the highest since Israel unilaterally withdrew from the small coastal territory in 2005, a period that has seen four previous Israeli wars on Gaza.

Entire neighbourhoods have been razed, surgeons are operating without anaesthetic on some of the wounded, and ice-cream trucks have become makeshift morgues.

In chaotic scenes, volunteer emergency crew and neighbours have clawed, sometimes with their bare hands, through broken concrete and sand to pull out civilian casualties.

All too often they recover only their corpses, which have piled up, wrapped in blood-stained white shrouds.

“Nowhere is safe in Gaza,” said Lynne Hastings, UN humanitarian coordinator for the Palestinian territories.

US President Joe Biden, a strong supporter of Israel, has joined the calls for it to “protect innocent civilians” and to follow the “laws of war” as it pursues Hamas targets.

Biden, also contemplating the future, stressed that “when this crisis is over, there has to be a vision of what comes next”.

He reiterated that Washington supports a two-state solution with independent Israeli and Palestinian states.

“It means a concentrated effort for all the parties, Israelis, Palestinians, regional partners, global leaders, to put us on a path toward peace,” said the US president.

For now though, the raging war has sparked fears of a regional conflagration if it draws in more of Israel’s enemies such as Iran-backed Syria and Hizbollah in Lebanon.

There has also been a rise of attacks on Israel’s top ally the United States, which has a vast network of military bases across the Middle East.

About 2,500 American troops are stationed in Iraq and some 900 in Syria to help fight remnants of the Daesh extremist group.

The Pentagon said there were 10 attacks on US and allied forces in Iraq and three in Syria between October 17 and 24, involving a “mix of one-way attack drones and rockets”.