Gaza death toll exceeds 20,000

Some military experts said more people had been killed more quickly in this war than during the deadliest stages of the U.s.-led wars in Afghanistan or Iraq.

The number of Gaza Strip residents reported killed during Israel’s 10-week-old war in the territory has already surpassed the toll for any other Arab conflict with Israel in more than 40 years and perhaps any since Israel’s founding in 1948.

The Gaza Health Ministry said Thursday that the death toll had exceeded 20,000 for the first time, putting it just above one of the most authoritative estimates of those killed in Lebanon by Israel’s 1982 invasion.

And though Gaza officials have said counting the dead has become increasingly challenging, most experts say the figure is likely an undercount and express shock at the enormity of the loss. Some military experts said more people had been killed more quickly in this war than during the deadliest stages of the U.s.-led wars in Afghanistan or Iraq.

Azmi Keshawi, the Gaza analyst for the International Crisis Group think tank, said this war was “more horrifying” than any he had experienced before. He said he and his family had fled his home in northern Gaza and moved six times so far. They now live in a tent near a U.N. shelter in the southern city of Rafah.

The Israeli military has engaged in an intense air and ground campaign to eliminate Hamas, the armed Palestinian group that rules Gaza and led the Oct. 7 attack that officials say killed about 1,200 people in Israel — the majority of them civilians but also including hundreds of soldiers. The assailants still hold scores of hostages.

The toll in Gaza is expected to rise significantly when Palestinians are able to dig out of the vast destruction that the war has wrought.

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a vocal critic of Hamas who grew up in Gaza but now lives in California, said Israeli airstrikes have so far killed more than 30 members of his family, including people in their 70s and cousins between the ages of 3 months and 9 years old.

Early in the war, he said, his childhood home was bombed, killing one young cousin. And last week, his aunt and uncle’s home was bombed, killing at least 31 people. Sitting in California, he watched video of their destroyed home on his phone. None of the people there were affiliated with Hamas, he said.

“It was a family home,” he said.