A UN worker was killed and another was injured in a strike
The Gaza Health Ministry: Report of the Gaza Airstrike in August and November 2004. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in Gaza
A U.N. report published on Friday said 254 aid workers had been killed in Gaza as of April 30. Seven aid workers from the World Central Kitchen were killed in an Israeli airstrike earlier this month.
The Israeli military said in a statement that it had received a report from the U.N. Department of Safety and Security that two of its workers were injured. The military declared an active combat zone when the vehicle hit was travelling in it. 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. He said more than 190 U.N. workers have been killed in Gaza since October and that all humanitarian workers must be protected.
Over the last week, fighting in Gaza has intensified, as the Israeli military ramps up its operation in Rafah. Reuters reported on Tuesday that tanks rolled deeper into the city. Half a million Palestinians have been forcibly removed from Gaza, with 450,000 of them coming from the city of Rafah.
Despite its revision based on identified deaths, the U.N. maintains that the Gaza Health Ministry’s overall death toll of more than 35,000 people killed in the ongoing Israeli military offensive in Gaza is reliable.
The Gaza Health Ministry says its count of 35,000 people killed — including the nearly 8,000 children fully identified — does not include thousands more people trapped under the rubble of homes or hastily buried in mass graves or side streets.
Netanyahu says his military has killed about 16,000 people in the Gaza offensive. The Israeli government has not given documentation about how the figures were arrived at.
The Health Ministry in Gaza has struggled to keep an up-to-date electronic database with the name, age, gender and ID number of each person killed in the war due to the scale of deaths and because most hospitals in the Gaza Strip have collapsed and stopped functioning.
For large mass casualty incidents in Gaza, we have had a sad experience with the Ministry of Health coordinating with us on casualty figures each few years, but in the past they have proven to be 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.
The Health Ministry’s figures are being criticized because of its administration under Hamas, the group that has governed the Gaza Strip since 2007.
In late October, after President Biden said he had “no confidence” in the figures reported by Gaza’s Health Ministry, the ministry published its database of thousands of victims’ names and other information.
Biden has since pressed Israel to limit civilian deaths, saying in an interview in March with MSNBC there cannot be “another 30,000 Palestinians dead.”
He said in a video that he would like civilians to go to humanitarian areas and away from Hamas’ crossfire.
What would he say about a man who doesn’t have diabetes drugs if he had a diabetes drug in his life?
He told NPR that a middle aged man who doesn’t have access to his diabetes drugs is one of the people he would pronounce dead every day. They are forgotten because their deaths are not due to bombs and missiles.
