Sharon Zhang
Truthout / October 7, 2024
Israel has killed 42,000 Palestinians and injured over 100,000 in a year — according to the most conservative counts.
In one year of genocide in Gaza, Israel has killed, wounded, detained or otherwise rendered missing at least 10 percent of Palestinians in Gaza.
Since October 7, 2023, over 50,000 Palestinians have been killed and over 100,000 have been injured, per the latest counts by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor in a report released for the anniversary of the start of the genocide. Thousands more are missing under the rubble, the total number unknown, and roughly 10,000 have been imprisoned by Israel, many held in Israel’s torture camps.
This amounts to roughly every 1 in 10 Palestinians of the estimated pre-genocide population of 2.3 million in Gaza. About a third of the casualties are children, amounting to over 16,000 children killed by the Israeli military, which has been sponsored at every step of the genocide by U.S. officials.
Euro-Med Monitor’s death count differs from that reported by the Gaza Ministry of Health — which currently stands at roughly 42,000 — as it accounts for reports by the human rights groups’ field team. But the true death toll is likely to be far, far higher; estimates from health experts have ranged from 100,000 to over 330,000, or about 15 percent of Gaza’s population.
In its over 100-page report, Euro-Med Monitor lays out some of the worst atrocities carried out by Israeli forces over the past year. It details the “systematic acts of genocide committed in Gaza, such as the targeted killing of civilians in homes, shelters, displacement camps, and humanitarian-declared zones,” and too many other examples to list.
As Euro-Med Monitor and other human rights groups have noted, Israeli forces have destroyed Gaza over the past year, nearly completely levelling the Strip. Those still alive face death around every corner, as Israel bombards Palestinians not just with bombs, but with the threat of starvation, disease or violent detainment.
Numbers alone fail to account for the horrors that Israeli forces have inflicted on Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank over the past year — and in the decades of apartheid and ethnic cleansing prior. Many Palestinians have lost huge swaths of their families; hundreds of thousands of children have had their lives and dreams destroyed, reduced to a daily struggle to survive; and Palestinians’ present, future, and even past in Gaza have been razed and stolen by Israeli forces.
The genocide’s toll on children alone is staggering. As Defense for Children International-Palestine noted on Monday, on top of the thousands of children killed by Israeli forces — including 171 infants and 710 children under the age of one — at least 26,000 children have been orphaned or lost a parent amid the genocide.
The genocide is only continuing. On Sunday, Israel launched its third invasion of Jabalia refugee camp, in northern Gaza, with Israeli forces killing dozens of
Sharon Zhang is a news writer at Truthout covering politics, climate and labour
