More than 20,000 people have been killed in the Gaza offensive

The Hamas crisis in Gaza isn’t the end of the road: Reports from Langfitt, Neuman and Brom

Frank Langfitt was reporting from Ramallah in the West Bank. Scott Neuman was reporting from Tel Aviv. NPR producer Anas Baba contributed from Rafah, in the Gaza Strip.

Meanwhile, for weeks, international aid groups have been warning of a growing humanitarian crisis in Gaza, with food, water and fuel and critical levels. The U.N. World Food Program said that “Gazans are increasingly desperate, with nowhere to go and nothing to eat.”

“Not only they don’t care about their populations, they’re seeing the casualties contribute to their cause,” he said. “Because that’s OK if they can mobilize the media [and] public opinion.”

The bombardment is killing civilians at a devastating pace, with the Gaza health ministry reporting about 20,000 people killed — a majority of them women and children — in the past 77 days of fighting. Bombings can often claim almost all of an extended family. Areas designated as safe for civilians have been routinely assailed by 2,000-pound bombs.

People who have followed past wars in Gaza say the Gaza Ministry of Health’s numbers are reliable. The ministry has traditionally used a digitized system to gather the names, ages and gender of the dead from hospitals and morgues.

Although the health ministry doesn’t differentiate between civilian and combatant deaths, it says the majority of those killed have been women and children. The ministry of Hamas says that another 50,000 have been wounded in Gaza. International aid groups generally agree with what it says.

But a retired Israeli brigadier general, Shlomo Brom, said it is difficult for troops to avoid civilian casualties when Hamas is embedded in mosques, schools and hospitals, as the Israelis claim.

Israeli bombardment of Gaza kills an U.N. Aid worker and an extended family: Achim Stein’s son and his wife also died in the December 9 blast

Es-Skani, who wears a black baseball cap, a salt and pepper beard, and is fatigued, said that one of his sons was buried under the rubble.

He says that his family were killed in the pre-dawn hours of December 9 when their apartment building in Gaza City was flattened by Israeli warplanes. One of the sons only survived because he stayed with his aunt.

Among those whose lives have been shattered by Israel’s bombardment is Yousef Es-Sakani. He is sitting on the edge of a planter under a tree in the center of Ramallah, which is a bustling, traffic-choked city in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and tries to make sense of Israeli strikes in Gaza that have killed thousands of people, including his family.

As the death toll keeps rising, Israel faces increasing international pressure to stop the bombing of Gaza. Even the Biden administration, which has firmly backed Israel’s stated goal of crushing Hamas, has repeatedly admonished Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to minimize civilian casualties.

Around one out of every 105 people has been killed since the war began, with the enclave’s population estimated at 2.1 million.

The resolution that was passed on Friday had the United States abstaining, but it did not call for a full cease-fire.

“The way Israel is conducting its offensive is creating massive obstacles to the distribution of humanitarian aid inside Gaza,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said in a post on social media on Friday.

Senior U.N. officials and many aid agencies have argued that a full cease-fire is needed to allow the distribution of aid to nearly 1.9 million displaced Palestinians, many of whom face spreading disease, hunger and an overwhelmed health-care systems.

On the same day that aid agencies criticized the U.N Security Council for not calling for a full cease-fire in Gaza, an aid worker and more than 70 members of his extended family were killed.

An Israeli airstrike killed Issam Al Mughrabi, who had worked at the U.N. Development Program for 30 years, and his wife, his five children, and more than 70 members of his extended family, Achim Steiner, an administrator at the agency, said in a statement.