Gaza death toll passes 50,000 in Israel’s war with Hamas, Health Ministry says

More than 50,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip, the enclave’s Health Ministry said Sunday - a grim indicator of the conflict’s continued lethality less than a week since Israel shattered a nearly two-month-old ceasefire, launching airstrikes and ground incursions into the territory.

Israel launched the war in Gaza in response to the deadly Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed about 1,200 people and took roughly 250 people hostage. Most of those hostages have been released through negotiated exchanges, and of the 59 Israeli hostages still being held in Gaza, 24 were believed to be alive before the conflict resumed.

Despite over a year of heavy bombardment of a strip of land of roughly 140 square miles, Israel has been unable to completely destroy Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that has ruled Gaza since 2007.

The two parties agreed to a ceasefire in January that paused hostilities and saw 33 Israeli hostages exchanged for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli detention. The first phase of what was supposed to be a three-phase path to a permanent end to the war lapsed on March 1, and the parties could not agree on an extension of that phase.

While Hamas wanted to immediately open talks for the second phase, in which Israel would fully withdraw from the enclave and Hamas would release remaining living hostages, Israel refused to engage in those talks and instead opted to extend the ceasefire.

Israel began bombing Gaza again Tuesday, breaking the fragile truce. The renewed Israeli attacks have killed more than 673 people since then, Gaza’s Health Ministry said midday Sunday, more than a third of whom were children. An additional 233 people who were killed previously were added to the count of the dead after a committee tracking the missing confirmed their deaths, the Health Ministry added.

Many of the casualties over the past week have been women and children, according to medical workers and eyewitnesses. The strikes have targeted senior political figures in Hamas, killing acting prime minister Essam Al-Da’alis and high-ranking officials in the Hamas-run justice and interior ministries.

Among the 41 people killed between Saturday afternoon and late Sunday morning was senior Hamas leader Salah al-Bardawil, a member of the movement’s political bureau, who was killed overnight, according to a statement from Hamas. The statement, which described the attack as an “assassination,” said Bardawil was killed alongside his wife when an Israeli airstrike hit his tent in al-Mawasi, an area of Khan Younis, as the couple was praying.

In a joint statement Sunday, the Israel Defense Forces and Israel Security Agency, or Shin Bet, said they carried out the strike that killed Bardawil, describing him as the head of Hamas’s “planning and development office.” It was unclear what role, if any, he had in the group’s military operations.

Ibrahim Madhoun, a Palestinian political analyst who is close to Hamas, said Sunday that Bardawil was not involved in the activities of the group’s military wing. He called Bardawil, who previously served as spokesman for the Hamas bloc in the Palestinian Legislative Council, a “symbol” within the movement and said his death was a “great loss.”

Also Sunday, the IDF said its troops had encircled the Tel al-Sultan neighborhood in Rafah in southern Gaza. “During the night, the troops encircled the area, eliminated several terrorists, and conducted a targeted raid on a terror infrastructure site that was used over the past few months as a command and control center of Hamas terrorists,” the statement said.

The Palestine Red Crescent Society said Sunday morning it had lost contact with a team of paramedics trapped in Rafah and was “awaiting clearance” to try to reach the group. Gaza’s civil defense force later said some of its crews were stuck in the same area after trying to rescue the Red Crescent staff and that they had also gone silent. Some 50,000 people living in the area encircled by Israeli troops faced “imminent danger” to their lives, the civil defense said.

The IDF said it was allowing civilians to evacuate, and an image Sunday showed families fleeing toward central Gaza, lugging babies, pillows and their few possessions by foot or cart.

Sunday also marked three weeks since Israel blocked all aid from entering Gaza in an effort to force Hamas to compromise. The siege has reversed progress made during the ceasefire, which brought a surge of aid into Gaza, toward alleviating the dire humanitarian crisis there.

“Every day without food inches Gaza closer to an acute hunger crisis,” Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner general of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, wrote on X. “Banning aid is a collective punishment on Gaza: the vast majority of its population are children, women & ordinary men.”

Mediators have scrambled to drag the two sides back to the negotiating table, but current and former officials said the intensity of the renewed Israeli airstrikes has complicated their ability to revive a diplomatic solution to the conflict.

The official figure of 50,021 killed since Oct. 7, 2023, does not distinguish between civilians and combatants, but Gaza’s Health Ministry says the majority of the dead are women and children. More than 113,000 people have been injured, according to the Health Ministry.

The Washington Post could not independently verify the ministry’s figures; Israel has not allowed international journalists into Gaza since the start of the war. But Palestinian journalists, first responders, international aid workers and war-casualty watchdogs all say the official death toll in Gaza is probably an undercount, with the chaos of war upending what experts and researchers say was once a robust reporting system for tracking and identifying the dead.

During the nearly two-month ceasefire in Gaza, some people managed to recover the bodies of loved ones trapped beneath the rubble, but thousands more remain unaccounted for, according to Gaza’s civil defense.