Iman Mussallam finds it hard to believe that the death toll announced by Hamas in the Gaza Strip has already reached 30,000, in less than five months of war between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist movement.
• Also read: Three Palestinians killed in Israeli raid in West Bank
• Also read: Hezbollah announces that it has fired a new volley of rockets at an Israeli base
• Also read: Hopes of a ceasefire in Gaza next week are being revived by Washington
But she also knows that the actual number of victims is “much higher” and that many victims are buried under the rubble of Israeli bombings. And it's only getting harder.
This war is already by far the deadliest of the five between Israel and Hamas, ahead of the 2014 war (2,250 Palestinians killed).
“We don't know how many martyrs there will be at the end of the war,” said the 30-year-old teacher, who sought refuge in a UN building-turned-emergency shelter in Rafah, in the Palestinian territory's far south.
These countless “tragedies” and “sufferings” will have catastrophic consequences for Palestinians for “generations,” Ahmed Orabi, professor of political science at the University of Gaza, told AFP.
The conflict was triggered by a bloody attack in southern Israel on October 7th by Hamas commandos from Gaza, where the Palestinian movement took power in 2007.
Israel has since launched a massive air and ground offensive in retaliation on Palestinian territory, where cemeteries are overcrowded and there are no longer enough body bags to pack bodies.
Here a farmer buried his three brothers and their five children on his citrus plantation. A mass grave was dug on a football field there.
Fear for Rafah
On Tuesday, the Hamas Health Ministry, whose figures are considered credible by the United Nations, said 96 people had been killed in Israeli night strikes, bringing the war toll since October 7 to 29,878 dead and 70,215 wounded.
About 70% of the dead were women and children, he said.
In the eyes of Palestinians, “the enormous number of women, children and elderly people killed leaves no doubt that these were massacres,” emphasizes Professor Orabi.
Every day, civilians are caught up in the fighting between air strikes, artillery and sniper fire that has spared no area, devastated entire neighborhoods and forced many families to flee, often without being able to take anything with them.
Many survive only thanks to the solidarity of loved ones, sometimes strangers, in a strip of land some 40 kilometers long and 10 kilometers wide, which was already undermined before the war by an Israeli blockade imposed since 2006, poverty and unemployment.
According to the United Nations, more than 70% of Gaza's 2.4 million residents have been displaced by the war and the population is facing starvation.
The latter, like many international leaders, now fears a bloodbath in Rafah, where Israel has every intention of quickly completing its ground offensive while nearly a million and a half people, 80% of the displaced, are huddled there.
“Death zone”
In Israel, attention remains focused on the approximately 1,160 people, mostly civilians, who were killed in the Oct. 7 attack, according to a count by the AFP news agency based on official data.
And about the fate of the 130 hostages kidnapped that day and still held in Gaza, a torture for their loved ones and a trauma of unprecedented proportions for the country. In total, around 250 people were kidnapped.
In Gaza, the population is surviving as best it can in the face of Israel's military response, deployed relentlessly on land, sea and air to “destroy” Hamas.
The Hamas Ministry of Health does not provide any information on the number of Hamas fighters killed. The Israeli army estimates there are 10,000. The Israeli army regrets the 240 deaths in the ground offensive and denies that it deliberately attacked civilians.
Among the civilian casualties, Gaza journalists who provide stories and images of the war to media outlets around the world are paying a heavy price. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, at least 88 media workers have died since October 7th.
Gaza, dubbed the “death zone” by World Health Organization (WHO) director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has become a place of constant mourning.
Not a day goes by without a funeral, which grieving families have to improvise to accommodate wartime conditions.
Because of a lack of fuel, bodies are often transported on carts pulled by donkeys.
The overwhelmed, exhausted and inadequate hospital staff sometimes has to use ice cream trucks to guard bodies before burials.
For Iman Mussallam, the war in Gaza is “the great massacre of modern history.”
It also attacks Hamas, which it accuses of leaving civilians behind to hide in its network of tunnels dug under Gaza.
But like many Gazans, she wonders: “How is this our fault?”