RAFAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — More than 20,000 Palestinians have died in Gaza during Israel’s war against Hamas, health officials said Friday, the latest indication of the staggering cost of the conflict as Israel expands its ground offensive and orders tens of thousands more people to leave their homes.
The deaths amount to nearly 1% of the territory’s prewar population.
The 11-week conflict has displaced nearly 85% of Gaza’s people and leveled wide swaths of the tiny coastal enclave. And more than half a million people in Gaza — a quarter of the population — are starving, according to a report Thursday from the United Nations and other agencies.
Israel has vowed to continue the war until Hamas is removed from power in Gaza and all the hostages taken during its Oct. 7 cross-border attack are freed.
Despite the humanitarian emergency, a U.N. Security Council vote on aid deliveries and terms for a cease-fire was delayed again late Thursday, after days of high-level negotiations.
The United States, which has veto power, has pushed back against calls for an immediate cease-fire and giving the U.N. sole responsibility for inspecting aid deliveries. Israel, citing security grounds, insists it needs to be able to screen goods entering Gaza.
The U.S. said it would back a revised resolution that calls for “creating the conditions” for a cease-fire, rather than an immediate end to fighting. Other countries support a stronger text and said diplomats would need to consult their governments before a vote, which is expected Friday.
Martin Griffiths, the U.N. humanitarian affairs chief, lamented the world’s inaction.
“That such a brutal conflict has been allowed to continue and for this long — despite the widespread condemnation, the physical and mental toll and the massive destruction — is an indelible stain on our collective conscience,” he wrote on the social media platform X.
Israel, shielded by the United States, has resisted international pressure to scale back its offensive and has said it would press on until Hamas, the militant group that has ruled Gaza for 16 years, has been destroyed.
The military has said that months of fighting lie ahead in southern Gaza, an area packed with the vast majority of the enclave’s 2.3 million people, many of whom were ordered to flee combat in the north earlier in the war.
Since then, evacuation orders have pushed displaced civilians into ever-smaller areas of the south as troops focus on the city of Khan Younis, Gaza’s second-largest.
The military said late Thursday that it is sending more ground forces, including combat engineers, to Khan Younis to target Hamas militants above ground and in tunnels. On Friday, it ordered tens of thousands of residents to leave their homes in Burej, an urban refugee camp, and surrounding communities, also in the south.
In the city of Rafah, on the border with Egypt, an airstrike on a house killed six people, according to Associated Press journalists who saw the bodies at a hospital. Among the dead were a blind man, his wife and their 4-month-old child, said the infant’s grandfather, Anwar Dhair.
Rafah is one of the few places in Gaza not under evacuation orders, but has been targeted in Israeli strikes almost every day.
