After 50 days of ceaseless air and ground attacks against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, figures say that Israel’s invasion has killed and injured more than 2.5 percent of Gaza’s population.
The four-day truce deal between Israel and Hamas that started this Friday paved the way for humanitarian workers in Gaza to dig through the rubble left behind by Israeli attacks and give more accurate figures of the number of casualties.
The latest numbers are unbelievably high. According to a report by the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor (Euromed) that was released this Monday, Israel has almost committed an ethnic cleansing in Gaza by killing at least 20,000 Palestinians since 7 October and injuring tens of thousands more.
“Our team recently completed an updated statistic of the number of victims, including those we were able to identify who were under the rubble, given the lack of chances of being alive. The number […] reached 20,031 martyrs, including 8,176 children,” said Euromed chairman Ramy Abdu in a tweet this Monday evening.
To makes matters even worse, Abdu also noted that the number is expected to increase as more bodies are recovered from under the rubble of destroyed buildings.
“This number, together with the wounded, represents an average of 2.6 percent of the population in the Gaza Strip, equivalent to 11 million Arab citizens, not to mention the number of dead bodies not discovered yet,” he said on Twitter.
Since October 7, the situation in the Gaza Strip has been alarming and the humanitarian crisis there is getting worse day by day as Gazan citizens face famine and water scarcity. Furthermore, most hospitals in the enclave have been put out of service due to Israeli attacks.
Despite all the destruction, Israel has admitted failure
Considering how deadly Israel’s attacks have been on Gaza during the past 50 days, one might come to the conclusion that Israel has so far been the winner of the war. But the facts on the ground suggest that Israel is not even close to such a scenario and this is what Israeli media acknowledge.
This Sunday, Basem Naim, a Hamas top official said that the armed group is still in “full control” of the enclave, including areas that have come under heavy bombardment by Israeli forces; “All they [the Israeli forces] have achieved is kill more women and children,” Naim noted.
This view was shared by several Israeli media outlets, admitting that Hamas succeeded in demonstrating its ability to send its members to northern Gaza despite the presence of the Israeli army nearby. The Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom, for example, noted last week that the Hamas movement is “far from collapsing” and called for the continuation of Israeli military operations against the Gaza Strip with the aim of “breaking the movement.”
likewise, the Hebrew language Channel 12 of the Israeli tv said this Sunday that “whoever is in a hurry to mourn Hamas should look at this day to understand that this is not the reality. After 49 days of fighting, Hamas has proven that it is still strong, and that it still controls the Gaza Strip.”
The channel also noted that Hamas successfully completed the exchange of captives, including one held by another Palestinian faction, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, despite claims it had lost control over its fighters and cells. “After all this, the scene of Hamas kneeling is still a long way off,” the channel added.
