Israel has killed least 10,022 Palestinians, including 4,104 children in air strikes on Gaza in just one month, the Gaza health ministry reported on 6 November.
The health ministry also said more than 200 people had died in overnight strikes.
“These are massacres! They destroyed three houses over the heads of their inhabitants — women and children,” one resident, Mahmoud Mechmech, told AFP in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza.
“We have already taken 40 bodies out of the rubble,” he said as crowds prayed around corpses wrapped in white shrouds outside a nearby hospital.
Both US President Joe Biden and Israeli officials have questioned the health ministry’s casualty counts, suggesting they are unreliable because the ministry is part of the Hamas-run government in Gaza.
However, the New York Times quietly acknowledged that the health ministry’s death toll is consistent with the US’ own count. “U.S. officials said their estimates of the number of Palestinians killed were similar,” to those of the ministry, the paper reported on 6 November.
The horrific casualties are in part due to Israel’s use of massive 2,000 lb bombs in densely packed residential areas. Last week, Israel bombed the Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza on consecutive days with such bombs, killing some 400.
After one of the strikes, an Israeli military spokesman acknowledged to CNN that the bomb was dropped knowing it would kill many civilians, even though the military was not sure a Hamas operative they claimed to target was present and had been killed in the strike.
Another zionist atrocity. Even #CNN's Wolf Blitzer is shocked that the #Israelis bombed #Gaza's biggest refugee camp at #Jabaliya, killing many civilian men, women and children, just to get at one Hamas commander. IOF spox: "this is the tragedy of war". pic.twitter.com/ApTXoj6br8
— tim anderson (@timand2037) October 31, 2023
The high number of Palestinian civilian casualties is a result of Israel’s military strategy, known as the “Dahiya doctrine,” which calls for targeting civilians to establish deterrence against its enemies.
As Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi explained, the doctrine was revealed publicly in 2008 by Maj. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot, who was head of the Northern Command and deputy chief of staff of the Israeli military during the 2006 war between Israel and Lebanese Hezbollah.
During the war, an entire southern suburb of Beirut, known as the Dahiya, was devastated from the air by troops under Eizenkot’s command using two-thousand-pound bombs and other similar ordnance.
Eizenkot stated: ‘What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on … We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases … This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved.”
