After a month of strikes and a ground invasion that is splitting Gaza in two, Israeli forces have now killed more than 10,000 Palestinians.
One month ago today: Exactly one month ago, Hamas terrorists brutally attacked Israeli civilians, killing 1,400 innocent people in a brutal pogrom and kidnapping 240 (most of whom are still being held hostage).
You probably know what’s followed. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) began a massive attack on the Gaza Strip, designed to weed out the group responsible for the massive slaughter of civilians. International observers have criticized Israel for hitting civilians in the course of trying to reach their targets. The whole region looks like a powder keg about to blow; Israel’s northern front with Iranian-backed Lebanon, where Hezbollah operates, has been heating up, and many fear the cascade of events that will ensue—Iranian-backed groups entering the conflict—if Israel makes a misstep.
Now, after one month of strikes and a ground invasion that started a week ago and has succeeded at splitting Gaza in two, separating north from south, the Israeli military has now killed more than 10,000 Palestinians. Children comprise about 40 percent of the total killed. It’s unclear how many of the total dead are Hamas terrorists. Estimates are from Gaza’s health ministry, which is controlled by Hamas and thus not always reliable; but when pressed to corroborate death tolls after President Joe Biden cast doubt on them, officials in Gaza “released a list with the names, ages, genders and ID numbers of all those it counted in its death toll, except for 281 whose remains were unidentifiable,” per New York Times reporting. “Gaza is becoming a graveyard for children,” Union Nations Secretary-General António Guterres told reporters this past Sunday.
Israeli strikes have led to massive civilian death tolls, but the IDF insists that this is due to the way Hamas conducts its operations, using Gazans as human shields. “Hamas fighters, numbering perhaps 30,000 by Israeli estimates, embed within Gaza’s population of 2.2 million and store weapons in or under civilian sites,” reports The New York Times. Israeli politicians have also turned toward citing massive death tolls imposed by other large Western democracies: the atomic bombs dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the U.
