The Israeli Airstrike and World Central Kitchen In Gaza During the Last Eight Months of the Gaza War: A U.N. Update
A U.N. report published on Friday said 254 aid workers had been killed in Gaza as of April 30. That includes seven aid workers from the humanitarian food organization World Central Kitchen who were killed in an Israeli airstrike at the beginning of April.
The Israeli military said in a statement that it had been informed that there were injuries to two of its workers. It also said that in an initial investigation, the vehicle hit was traveling in what the military declared an active combat zone. The Israeli military also said that it didn’t receive notice of the vehicle’s route.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he was “deeply saddened” by the news and called for a full investigation. In the last eight months, more than 190 UN workers have been killed in Gaza.
Israel has besieged the Gaza Strip for most of the war, impeding access to electricity, running water, food and medical aid. The northern part of Gaza is in a state of famine according to the U.N. World Food Programme.
TEL AVIV, Israel — The United Nations says it revised down its tally of women and children killed over the past seven months in the Gaza Strip as the Health Ministry in the territory confirms most, but not all, the identities of the casualties.
The U.N. says while it cannot independently verify each death due to the sheer scale and continued fighting, figures provided by Gaza’s Health Ministry have nearly matched the U.N.’s own counts in past wars.
The Health Ministry’s overall death toll of more than 35,000 spans the past seven months of the war that began Oct. 7, when Hamas launched an assault on southern Israel, killing 1,200 people there and taking around 250 hostages, according to Israeli authorities.
The Islamic Medical Association of North America has someone volunteering in Gaza. He says every day he was declaring patients dead from treatable illnesses due to a lack of supplies and the crumbling health care system.
Sometimes, we have trouble coordinating with the Ministry of Health for casualty figures for large mass casualty incidents in Gaza, and in past times, their figures have been generally accurate.
NPR reported earlier this year that the death count in Gaza is based on a combination of fatalities recorded in hospitals that are still partially operating, and on estimates from media reports to assess deaths in the north, where Israeli forces control access and where most hospitals have been raided and shut down.
Critics of the Health Ministry’s figures point to its administration under Hamas, the group that has governed the Gaza Strip since mid-2007, much of that under blockade.
The database of thousands of victims’ names was released by the health ministry after President Biden said he had no confidence in their figures.
In an interview with MSNBC in March, Biden said there can’t be more than 30,000 Palestinians dead.
“Prior to our operations we urge civilians to temporarily move towards humanitarian areas and move away from the crossfire that Hamas puts them in,” he said in a video this week.
‘People die everyday from things that are not meant to kill’: a doctor’s look at a woman’s “death”
“Every day I, myself, [would] pronounce people dead from very routine medical conditions such as a grandmother with a urinary tract infection, the middle-aged man who dies from his diabetes because he doesn’t have access to his medicines,” he told NPR. He said their deaths are “forgotten because it’s not due to bombings and missiles and drones.”