Shafaq News/ More than 10,000 people have been killed in 31 days of relentless Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip, according to Palestinian health officials, with no signs of a ceasefire in the besieged enclave.
In a statement on Monday, Gaza's health ministry said the death toll had risen to at least 10,022 Palestinians, including 4,104 children, with many still trapped beneath the rubble and an Israeli siege stretching access to vital goods like fuel, food, and electricity.
"The number [death toll] is expected to go up as at least 2,000 people remain under the rubble. The problem is, with lack of heavy equipment and machinery, the rescue teams on the ground are unable to remove and pull out these bodies from under the rubble," Al Jazeera correspondent Hani Mahmoud reported from Khan Younis in southern Gaza.
While Israel has vowed to destroy the Palestinian armed group Hamas, which carried out an attack on southern Israel on October 7 that Israeli authorities say killed more than 1,400 people, most of them civilians, humanitarian conditions in Gaza have reached a critical point under constant Israeli bombardment.
Running low on fuel supplies, 16 of Gaza's 35 hospitals have been forced to suspend operations, as the number of people wounded in the bombing passes 25,000 and the UN says that more than 1.5 million people, which is more than half of Gaza's population, have been displaced.
As conditions in Gaza have increasingly deteriorated and the death toll continues to rise, calls have grown for an end to the fighting. In late October, the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly in favour of a resolution calling for an immediate humanitarian truce.
Both Israel and its most powerful ally, the United States, have rejected calls for a ceasefire, saying that an end to the fighting would allow Hamas time to regroup. The US has said that it would support a brief pause in the fighting to allow more assistance to enter Gaza, but Israel has shown little enthusiasm for this idea.
As Israel steps up ground operations inside Gaza and continues its campaign of airstrikes, Palestinians fear that there is no end in sight.
