Gaza’s Health Ministry said Monday that Israeli attacks killed at least 52 Palestinians and wounded 203 in the previous 24-hour period as the daily US-backed slaughter continues.
Strikes on Monday included an Israeli attack on the Shati refugee camp in northern Gaza. According to the Palestinian news agency WAFA, the strike targeted a group of civilians, killing at least four.
WAFA also reported five Palestinians were killed by an Israeli strike in Beit Lahia, a northern city that’s been under a total siege since early October as part of an ethnic cleansing campaign. In central Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp, at least three Palestinians were killed by an Israeli bombing. Later in the day, a young girl injured by strikes in Nuseirat succumbed to her wounds and died.
Dr. Hussam Abu Safia, the director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia, said in a video message that Israeli snipers were targeting hospital staff. “Anyone moving within the hospital wards was at risk of being shot, creating a very dangerous situation for both patients and staff,” Abu Safia said, according to Drop Site News.
A day earlier, Israeli strikes on a school sheltering displaced Palestinians in the southern city of Khan Younis killed at least 20, including women and children. Israeli strikes on Sunday also killed an Al Jazeera journalist and five rescue workers.
The Health Ministry said on Monday that the latest violence has brought its recorded death toll since October 2023 to 45,028 and the number of wounded to 106,962. The ministry has mostly only counted dead and wounded Palestinians who have been brought to hospitals and morgues, and its figures do not account for Palestinians who are missing and presumed dead under the rubble.
Amjad Shawa, director of the Palestinian NGO Network, told Al Jazeera that the real death toll is likely much higher because “thousands of people” are either under the rubble, missing, detained, or killed. “We have concerns that the number will increase even more since Civil Defense [teams] … cannot reach the bodies under the rubble,” Shawa said.
In October, a group of American healthcare workers who volunteered in Gaza estimated in an open letter to President Biden that the US-backed Israeli onslaught has killed at least 118,908 Palestinians, a total that includes indirect deaths caused by the Israeli siege. Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, who led the letter, told Antiwar.com in a recent interview that the estimate was the bare minimum they came up with by looking at the available data.
