Gaza
Israeli forces have killed 1,233 Palestinians since the ceasefire began
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
Two hundred and ninety-four days into Gaza's ceasefire, the Palestinian side's nightly ledger to the mediators records 1,233 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces since the guns were supposed to fall silent last October — among them 266 children, 131 women and 37 elderly people — and 4,076 wounded, according to the latest report shared with the mediators and obtained by Drop Site News. Children, women and the elderly account for 35.1 per cent of the dead and 49.1 per cent of the wounded. The report counts 4,034 recorded violations of the agreement — 1,784 airstrikes and shelling attacks, 1,570 live-fire incidents, 169 military incursions, 430 home demolitions and 81 detention raids — an average of 13.7 violations for every day the ceasefire has stood.
Saturday's page of the log alone lists 21 violations, seven Palestinians killed and 23 wounded, ten of them children. The names run through the day like a clock. At 10:30 in the morning, a drone strike near a pharmacy on Third Street in Gaza City's Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood killed Hassan Qahman and Alaa al-Taramsi. At 12:15, a drone killed Saber Mohammed Khalil Rabie near the Deir al-Balah entrance on Salah al-Din Street. At 14:25, Salem Jamal Abu Libda, 27, died of wounds from an earlier strike in Khan Younis. In the evening: Hassan Hisham al-Khodari, 38, killed by a drone near al-Thalathini Street; Kamal Alaa Aliwa and Zakaria Ahmed Zaidiya, killed together when a strike hit a rooftop in Harat al-Rayes south of Gaza City; one more Palestinian killed on Deir al-Latin Street in the Old City. Between the deaths, the log records naval fire off Rafah and Gaza City's northern beaches, artillery on southern Khan Younis, warplanes bombing the pharmaceutical warehouse of al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, four quadcopter drones detonated near al-Zaytoun Sports Club, gunfire toward the tents of the displaced in al-Mawasi, and a night-time advance into eastern al-Zaytoun with fire toward displaced families in Abu Marahil camp.
The ledger's second half measures the agreement's promises against what actually arrived. The deal stipulates 600 trucks of aid, goods and fuel a day; the report counts 62,232 trucks since the ceasefire began — 35.2 per cent of what was agreed, an average of 211.6 a day. Fuel is the deepest cut, at 15.1 per cent of the committed level. In the past week, 1,466 of a scheduled 4,200 trucks entered. On Saturday, the count was zero: no aid, no commercial goods, no fuel. The Rafah crossing was closed the same day against an agreed daily quota of 200 travellers; since the ceasefire began, 10,169 of 26,800 scheduled passengers have crossed — 38.2 per cent — and 88 people have been turned back. Beyond the daily arithmetic, the report says Israeli forces continue to hold roughly 34 square kilometres past the agreed withdrawal lines, block repairs to electricity, water and sewage networks, and bar the heavy machinery reconstruction requires, while subjecting detainees — 159 held since the ceasefire began — to torture and inhuman treatment and leaving the fate of the missing unresolved. Israel, the report charges, keeps supplying the mediators with misleading figures while refusing independent international monitoring.
The document's conclusion is written in the language of a case file rather than a communiqué: the violations, it says, form a continuous and systematic pattern that has struck at the core of the agreement and stripped its procedures of practical substance, and it calls for serious international action to protect civilians. The numbers give that conclusion its weight — a ceasefire under which a Palestinian has been killed, on average, every five and three-quarter hours for nearly ten months.
