Gaza’s Health Ministry said Tuesday that Israeli attacks had killed at least 31 Palestinians and wounded 57 over the previous 24-hour period as the daily US-backed slaughter shows no sign of letting up.
The Health Ministry’s figures only account for dead and wounded Palestinians brought to hospitals. “A number of victims are still under the rubble and on the roads, and ambulance and civil defense crews cannot reach them,” the ministry wrote on Telegram.
Later in the day, medical sources told Al Jazeera that Israeli strikes killed 49 Palestinians in Gaza since dawn on Thursday, including five children in the so-called al-Mawasi “safe zone.”
The ministry warned in another post about the dire situation Gaza’s hospitals are facing due to shortages and looting of fuel and aid deliveries. “Hospitals do not have any fuel stock due to the occupation’s policy of rationing fuel since the beginning of the war on Gaza,” the post warned.
The ministry said the Israeli military was forcing “aid convoys, including fuel trucks, to take roads filled with thieves and bandits to steal them under its protection.” The Israeli newspaper Haaretz previously reported that the IDF was allowing armed gangs to loot aid convoys.
Israeli attacks on Tuesday included heavy strikes on Gaza City. According to the Palestinian news agency WAFA, at least eight Palestinians were killed by Israeli shelling and drone fire in areas east of Gaza City.
Al Jazeera reported a strike on a home in Gaza City, but the number of casualties is unclear as bodies remained under the rubble. “We are still looking for loved ones. We’re still trying to recover them from under the rubble,” said Khalil Abed, a survivor of the attack. “We’re just using our hands to find them because we don’t have any tools. The Israelis attacked us without warning.”
Israeli strikes also hit central Gaza, killing at least three Palestinians in the Bureij refugee camp and two in the Nuseirat refugee camp.
The Health Ministry said the latest violence brought its death toll since October 2023 to 45,885 and the number of wounded to 109,196.
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.
