More than 20,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Israel-Hamas war, Gaza health officials say

 Roughly two-thirds of the dead from Israeli airstrikes were women or minors, according to Gaza’s health authority. (Reuters)

RAFAH: Health officials in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip say more than 20,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war between Israel and Hamas.
The figure, amounting to nearly one percent of the territory’s prewar population, is a new reflection of the staggering cost of the war, which in just over 10 weeks has displaced more than 80 percent of Gaza’s people and devastated wide swaths of the tiny coastal enclave.
Gaza’s health ministry said Friday that it has documented 20,057 deaths in the fighting. It does not differentiate between combatant and civilian deaths. It has previously said that roughly two-thirds of the dead were women or minors.

Bad News from the Front – Top Israeli Analyst on War Gone Bad and the ‘Unbridgeable Gap’

CAIRO: The failure of the UN Security Council to agree on a permanent ceasefire in Gaza is equivalent to providing Israel with a “license to kill,” Arab League Secretary-General Ahmed Aboul Gheit has said.

The Security Council’s resolution, which was adopted on Friday to boost humanitarian aid to Gaza, was a step in the right direction, but it fell short of the aspired goal to achieve a full ceasefire in the besieged enclave, he added.

The humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza needs serious and firm action beyond “tranquilizers to absorb the international public opinion’s wrath,” Aboul Gheit said.

The UN Security Council approved a toned-down resolution that called for urgent steps to “immediately allow safe, unhindered, and expanded humanitarian access and to create the conditions for a sustainable cessation of hostilities” after a week of vote delays and intense negotiations to avoid a veto by the US.

Israel’s intense aerial campaign and ground offensive have left the majority of Gaza in ruins and pushed one of the most densely populated regions in the world into a serious humanitarian crisis.

The rising death toll reached 20,000 as the war entered its third month.

In the article, Harel illustrates several critical issues that are making it particularly difficult for Tel Aviv to prolong this phase of the war.

In an article published on Friday in the Hebrew edition of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Israeli journalist and political analyst Amos Harel argued that there is “a large gap, almost unbridgeable” between Israeli politicians’ statements and the reality in Gaza. 

In the article, Harel illustrates several critical issues that are making it particularly difficult for Tel Aviv to prolong this phase of the war. According to Harel, Israel may soon be forced to demobilize reserve soldiers and create a buffer zone in Gaza.