Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, including at least 16,456 children and more than 11,000 women.
The Gaza Health Ministry announced the grim toll on Thursday, a figure that is likely an underestimate because most of the 10,000 missing Palestinians are believed to be buried under mountains of rubble.
“Can you imagine what 40,000 means? It is a catastrophic number that the world cannot imagine,” Aseel Matar, a Palestinian woman from Gaza, told Tel Aviv Tribune.
“Despite this, the world sees us, hears us, watches us every day, every minute, but remains silent and we are powerless. We are exhausted, we have no more energy.”
Shortly after the ministry announced the death toll, a new round of negotiations aimed at ending the war began Thursday afternoon in Doha, the capital of Qatar. Qatar, Egypt and the United States are mediating the high-stakes talks, which include senior Israeli officials.
According to the United Nations, Israeli bombings have damaged or destroyed two-thirds of the buildings in the Gaza Strip.
“Today marks a tragic turning point for the world,” said UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk. “This unimaginable situation is due in large part to the Israeli military’s repeated disregard for the rules of war.”
Hani Mahmoud, Tel Aviv Tribune’s correspondent from Deir el-Balah in Gaza, said the figure of 40,000 was “a very conservative estimate of the number of casualties in Gaza.”
“There are still people missing and trapped under the rubble, who have not been identified, who have not been recovered, who have not yet been counted,” he said.
“There are those who are missing, whose relatives know nothing of their fate. There are those who have been reduced to nothing by the intensity and scale of the bombings.”
Israel’s relentless campaign in Gaza, the subject of genocide allegations before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), has displaced more than 90 percent of the Gaza Strip’s population and created a humanitarian disaster, compounded by Israel’s widespread refusal to provide essential humanitarian aid to Gaza.
Despite the ICJ’s order for Israel to allow aid into Gaza, July marked the lowest level of aid entering the Gaza Strip since October 2023, when the war began following a Hamas incursion into southern Israel that killed more than 1,100 people, including many Israeli civilians.
Amid deteriorating living conditions, famine and deadly diseases such as polio have spread in Gaza.
“We need a ceasefire, even a temporary one, to carry out these campaigns. Otherwise, we risk seeing the virus spread further, including across borders,” said Hanan Balkhy, regional director of the World Health Organization (WHO).
The death toll given by the Health Ministry is conservative, with a study published in the medical journal The Lancet in July suggesting the figure could be as high as 186,000, a number that would represent about 8 percent of Gaza’s total population.
Israeli forces have targeted schools, aid workers, medical facilities and UN shelters throughout the war, including some housing large numbers of displaced people. Israel claims that these facilities are used by Hamas for military purposes, but these claims often lack evidence.
In the first ten days of August, Israel struck at least five schools in Gaza, killing more than 150 people.
Reports of abuses by Israeli forces, such as systematic torture, extrajudicial killings, and the destruction of civilian infrastructure, agricultural land, and religious and cultural sites, were also numerous throughout the war.
The war has also been the deadliest in modern history for journalists, with the Committee to Protect Journalists saying that 113 media workers have been killed since the start of the war, including 108 Palestinians.
While Israel bars foreign journalists from entering the Gaza Strip, Palestinian reporters have endured grueling conditions and the danger of Israeli attacks to document the lives of civilians on the ground in Gaza.
The United States has played a central role in this war, transferring massive amounts of weapons to Israel, despite widespread violations of international law. The Biden administration announced last week that it had authorized an additional $20 billion in arms sales to Israel.
“There is such an erosion of the very foundation of international law,” Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, told Tel Aviv Tribune.
“This system (of international law) was created after World War II to prevent and punish atrocities like these, particularly to prevent them. So it has failed. But it also shows us that there is a huge hypocrisy in the system, because a few powerful states have the ability to determine to whom international law can apply and to whom it cannot apply, and Israel falls into the latter category. This is unacceptable,” she said.