THE Gaza Strip Government Media Office (GMO) has published its annual report about Israel’s devastating war on Gaza since October 7th, 2023.
According to the report, which was released this week, the Israeli occupation has turned the Gaza Strip into ruins, with the rate of total destruction reaching 86%.
During this course of time, the Israeli army has executed 3,628 massacres, resulting in the killing and missing of 51,615 Palestinians, including 16,891 children and 11,458 women.
986 Palestinians working in the healthcare sector were also killed, while 174 journalists were murdered.
10,000 Palestinians are still missing under the rubble, while 520 martyrs have been recovered from seven mass graves that were built inside hospitals.
Moreover, 96,359 Palestinians have been wounded, including 396 journalists.
69% of the victims were children and women, while 25,973 children have lost at least one of their parents. 3,500 other children are at risk of death due to malnutrition and starvation.
It has been 146 days since Israel has closed all of Gaza’s crossings, including Rafah crossing, resulting in 12,000 wounded people being in dire need of travel for ‘life-saving’ treatment, 11,000 of whom are in need of conducting medical operations.
With two million Gazans now being internally displaced either in tents or school-turned shelters, 1,737,524 Palestinians have been infected with infectious diseases as a result of displacement.
In addition, 71,338 people are suffering from viral hepatitis infection due to the displacement.
Meanwhile, a new analysis by Oxfam has found that the Israeli army has killed more children and women in the besieged and bombarded Gaza Strip over the past 12 months than the equivalent period of any other war in the last two decades.
In a statement, the charity said that conservative figures put the number of children and women killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza to more than 11,000 and 6,000, respectively.
Estimated figures from 2004-2021 on direct conflict deaths from the Small Arms Survey show that the highest number of women killed in a single year was more than 2,600 in Iraq in 2016, Oxfam said.
It added that a report by Every Casualty Counts examined information on more than 11,000 children killed across the first 30 months of the Syrian war, an average of more than 4,700 deaths a year.
UN reports on Children and Armed Conflict over the past 18 years show that no other conflicts killed a higher number of children in 12 months, Oxfam said.
‘These staggering figures are both appalling and heartbreaking,’ said Sally Abi Khalil, Oxfam’s Middle East and North Africa director.
‘Influential actors in the international community have not only failed to hold Israel to account, they are also complicit in the atrocities by continuing to unconditionally supply it with arms. It will take generations to recover from the devastating impacts of this war and there is still no ceasefire in sight.’
The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor says that the number of Palestinian children, whether infants or children in general, killed by the Israeli army is horrifying and unprecedented in the modern history of wars, and reflects a dangerous pattern based on dehumanisation of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip by targeting them and their children in a deliberate, systematic and widespread manner without stopping for almost twelve months, and in the most brutal and horrific ways.
The Monitor confirmed in a statement that many children had their heads and body parts severed as a result of the highly destructive Israeli bombing of civilian gatherings, especially homes, buildings, residential neighbourhoods, shelters and tents for the forcibly displaced, which constitutes a flagrant violation of the rules of distinction, proportionality, military necessity and taking the necessary precautions.
The human rights Monitor highlighted that the Israeli army possesses advanced technology, and it knows every time it targets a home or shelter that there are civilians inside it, including children and women, and yet it bombs them with missiles and bombs with great destructive power, deliberately causing the greatest possible loss of civilian lives and severe injuries, as evidenced by the repeated, systematic and widespread pattern of Israeli targeting of civilians in the Gaza Strip, and the highly destructive and indiscriminate weapons, especially against areas with dense civilian populations.
The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor demonstrated the brutality of the occupation with the martyrdom of the two infants, Aser and Aysal Muhammad Abu Al-Qumsan, last month, who were twins who were not more than four days old.
They were killed on the morning of August 13, 2024, along with their mother Juman and their grandmother, in an Israeli bombardment that targeted a residential apartment in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip.
It pointed out that the father of the two children had gone out to obtain a birth certificate for his two newborn children, and returned to the apartment to find it destroyed and all of his family members, in addition to the grandmother, killed in a direct Israeli targeting of the house.
The Monitor reported that two other infants, Wissam and Naeem Abu Anza, aged six months, were also killed along with their father and 11 family members in an Israeli airstrike on the Al-Salam neighbourhood in Rafah, south of the Gaza Strip, on March 3.
Rania Abu Anza, the mother of the two children, said that she gave birth to the two infants after ten years of trying to fertilise and implant them inside the womb, to fulfil her dream of becoming a mother, saying: ‘They implanted three embryos in me, two of them remained, and now they are gone.
‘Ten days after their deaths, they would have been six months old. They bombed the house, my husband, my children and the family were killed in the massacre.’
The most prominent testimony was given by Abdul Hafez Al-Najjar (42 years old), the father of the child ‘Ahmed’ who was beheaded and killed with three of his brothers, their mother and a large number of victims in an Israeli massacre that targeted displaced people in tents in the Barksat area west of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on May 26.
He told the Euro-Med team: ‘My child Ahmed looked very beautiful. He was a year and a half old. His head was cut off in the Israeli bombing. His head was separated from his body. When I saw him, I felt oppressed. He was buried without his head.’
The Euro-Med team also mentioned the case of Shaimaa Al-Ghoul, who was nine months pregnant when her house in the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip was bombed on February 12, killing her husband and her two sons, Mohammed and Janan.
She was also injured by shrapnel in her abdomen that reached the foetus. Al-Ghoul reported that her husband, Abdullah Abu Jazar, had prepared for her ‘dates, sweets, and a Christmas bag in celebration of his expected newborn before he was killed with his two children.’
She said that she gave birth to a child whom she named Abdullah, after his father, but he only lived one day, as he died from his shrapnel wound, they all died, leaving her alone.
Euro-Med confirmed that dozens of unborn children were killed in hospitals as a result of the lack of oxygen and electricity, the absence of care, and the targeting of hospitals over the past eleven months.
The human rights Monitor said that Israel continues to kill thousands of Palestinian men and women in the Gaza Strip, most of them in their reproductive years, including pregnant women, and thousands of children, including infants.
As a result of the widespread destruction of civilian objects in the Gaza Strip, including homes, private property, livelihoods, production, and the economic and commercial system that the Israeli army deliberately created and subjected the population to living conditions intended to destroy and impoverish them, most children in the Gaza Strip have lost their homes, their own economic security and that of their families.
This is in addition to being deprived of education, which will have serious repercussions on their future and their ability to enjoy their other rights, and will make them more vulnerable to poverty, unemployment and exploitation, and less able to contribute to rebuilding Palestinian society in the Strip after the end of the Israeli military attack, thus forcing Palestinians to migrate directly and indirectly.
The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said that the effects of these crimes will not end with the end of the war, and will remain with them throughout their lives, and this is one of the most prominent goals of the Israeli crime of genocide.
There are thousands of children who have lost their fathers and/or mothers, thousands of children who have had limbs amputated and have suffered severe burns and other serious injuries, and the vast majority of children have suffered psychological trauma that may be difficult to treat, while the majority of children suffer from hunger, malnutrition and dehydration, which will negatively affect their future growth and their physical, mental and educational abilities.
