Yusuf Dhia-Allah
While the world’s attention was diverted to the US-Israel war on Iran where the shooting has stopped, at least temporarily, there is no let-up in the zionists’ genocidal war on Gaza. According to figures released by Gaza’s Health Ministry, between October 8, 2023 and June 23, 2025, a total of 56,412 Palestinians have been killed and 133,054 injured by Israeli occupation forces.
These are definitely conservative figures, as a report published by the Israeli newspaper, Ha’aretz on June 26 shows. The actual death toll has surpassed 100,000. This represents about 4% of Gaza’s population. The vast majority of Palestinians killed are women and children.
Israel has also used starvation as a weapon of war. Hundreds of trucks loaded with flour, water and medicines are refused entry into Gaza through the Rafah crossing with Egypt. The zionists aided by the US have set up “food distribution” points which are used as shooting galleries.
Palestinians face a grim choice: if they go to the distribution point, they risk being shot and killed by the zionist soldiers. If they stay in their tent encampments they will starve to death. Hundreds of Palestinians have been shot at these so-called distribution points which are esentially entrapments.
The food situation is so bad that at least 66 children have died of starvation. This is the direct result of Israel withholding food deliveries, especially baby milk formula, according to Gaza’s Government Media Office. This is collective punishment and constitutes a war crime and crime against humanity.
Let us consider the discrepency between the Gaza Health Ministry figures and those mentioned in the Ha’aretz report. This is the result of different methods of tabulation. The Gaza Health Ministry figures include only those people who died in hospital or whose deaths were registered at a hospital. Indirect deaths caused by the effects of the war such as hunger, cold and diseases amid a collapse of the health system in Gaza are not included in the health ministry figures.
Since October 2023, Israeli spokespersons and journalists have attempted to dismiss Palestinian figures as exaggerated but increasingly international experts “are stating that not only is this list, with all the horror it embodies, reliable – but that it may even be very conservative in relation to reality.”
The Ha’aretz report about deaths in Gaza is based on a study conducted by Professor Michael Spagat, an economist at Holloway College at the University of London. Recognized as a world authority on mortality in violent conflicts, Professor Spagat’s study surveyed 2,000 households in the Gaza Strip, comprising almost 10,000 people. “They concluded that, as of January 2025, some 75,200 people died a violent death in Gaza during the war, the vast majority caused by Israeli munitions,” it said.
The other 25,000 or more died of hunger, disease or cold. “That’s an exceptional figure when compared with almost every other conflict since World War II,” Haaretz quoted him as saying. Given that the overwhelming majority of those killed (56%) are women and children, it makes Israel’s war on Gaza “one of the bloodiest conflicts of the 21st century.”
Since Israel launched its barbarous assault on Gaza in early October 2023, it has destroyed virtually every structure in the tiny enclave. Israeli officials, whether political or military, have made no secret of turning Gaza into a wasteland. And they have been quite candid about not distinguishing between fighters and civilians including children.
On October 12, 2023, for instance, Israeli president Isaac Herzog said at a Tel Aviv press conference that there are “no innocents in Gaza.” When the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague made reference to Herzog’s “no innocents in Gaza” remark, the Israeli president lashed out at the court accusing it of “twisting his words”.
A few weeks later, Ha’aretz found the Israeli military had established “kill zones” where anyone who crossed these invisible boundaries was targeted. It confirmed the fact that the zionists do not distinguish between combatants and civilians, as stated openly by Herzog. It is a clear violation of the laws of war, a fact repeatedly stressed by many human rights organizations.
The zionist killing machine has now expanded its “kill zones” to so-called food distribution points. Starving Palestinians are lured to these death traps and then shot and killed.
The World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus described the situation as having “surpassed catastrophic levels.” He revealed that “at least 500 people have been killed while trying to access food at aid distribution points controlled by the US and Israel, which operate outside the United Nations system.”
WHO has said that on average 112 children are admitted to hospitals every day because of severe malnutrition. Given the lack of medicines at the few partially functioning hospitals, there is little the doctors or nurses can do to help the starving children.
Of the 36 medical facilities in Gaza, only 17 remain partially operational. They lack basic medicines as well as other essentials necessary to treat the stream of wounded brought into hospitals. There are no functioning hospitals at all in northern Gaza or in Rafah, two areas subjected to relentless Israeli bombing and forced displacement.
Scores of doctors and nurses have been killed. Dozens more have been arrested and held in appalling conditions in Israel’s notorious prisons where torture is rampant.
A documentary commissioned by the BBC, titled Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, was dropped by the British government-funded channel. The documentary shows Israeli forces systematically targeting Gaza’s hospitals and medical staff throughout their military campaign. It will now be shown by Britain’s Channel 4 on July 2.
“This is a meticulously reported and important film examining evidence which supports allegations of grave breaches of international law by Israeli forces,” said Louisa Compton, Channel 4’s Head of News and Current Affairs. “It exemplifies Channel 4’s commitment to brave and fearless journalism,” she announced on June 28.
The documentary offers deeply disturbing footage and testimonies that show Gaza’s doctors and paramedics were not only denied the protections afforded to health officials under international law but were also actively hunted, imprisoned, and even tortured by the Israeli army.
Israeli soldiers have also shot and killed journalists. So far, more than 232 journalists have been murdered, making it the deadliest conflict for media workers ever recorded, according to a report by the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs’ Costs of War project. More journalists have been killed in Gaza than the combined totals of two world wars, the Vietnam War, the wars in Yugoslavia and the US war on Afghanistan.
It is not difficult to surmise why the zionists would indulge in such barbaric practices. The attacks on medical staff are designed to prevent Palestinians injured by Israeli soldiers from receiving treatment. And journalists are targeted to prevent zionist crimes from being shown to the world. They know that there may come a day when their crimes would be presented at a properly constituted court of law and the perpetrators brought to justice.
The zionist plan is clear: make life so miserable for the Palestinians that they would want to leave. So far, they have refused despite the horrific suffering they have been subjected to. The Palestinians know that if they were to leave, as they did in 1947-1948, they will never be allowed to return to their ancestral lands.
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