Israel’s response to the October 7 attack in the Gaza Strip: The U.S. Department of Health and the United Nations World Food Program

NPR’s Frank Langfitt reported from Ramallah, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Scott Neuman was in Tel Aviv. NPR producer Anas Baba contributed from Rafah, in the Gaza Strip.

International aid groups have been warning for weeks of a growing humanitarian crisis in Gaza with food, water and fuel. The United Nations World Food Program warned Monday that Gazans are becoming more desperate with nowhere to go and nothing to eat.

“Not only they don’t care about their populations, they’re seeing the casualties contribute to their cause,” he said. “If they can mobilize the media and get public opinion, that’s fine.”

Israel launched its offensive in Gaza in response to the Oct. 7 attack, when Hamas staged a lightning strike on southern Israel, killing 1,200 people, Israel says. The Islamist militant group also seized around 240 hostages, but freed more than a hundred of them during a week-long cease-fire at the end of November. At least 110 others remain in captivity, Israeli officials say.

People who have followed past wars in Gaza say the Gaza Ministry of Health’s numbers are reliable. The ministry has traditionally used a digitized system to gather the names, ages and gender of the dead from hospitals and morgues.

The majority of the people killed have been women and children, according to the health ministry. Another 50,000 people in Gaza have been wounded, the Hamas-controlled ministry says. International aid groups generally agree with its tallies.

But a retired Israeli brigadier general, Shlomo Brom, said it is difficult for troops to avoid civilian casualties when Hamas is embedded in mosques, schools and hospitals, as the Israelis claim.

The tragedy of the December 9 explosion that killed an Israeli aid worker and 11–days: Israel’s fight against the Hamas armed group

Of his two sons killed, the body of one remains buried under the rubble, says Es-Sakani, who wears a black baseball cap, a salt-and-pepper beard and an expression of weary stoicism.

The family of five were killed in the early morning hours of December 9, when their four-story Gaza City apartment building was destroyed by Israeli warplanes. The third son was the only survivor because he stayed with his aunt.

The strike that killed Mr. Al Mughrabi underscored the scope of Israel’s continuing bombardment of Gaza’s densely populated areas with heavy munitions, which U.N. officials have said is not only taking lives but making it nearly impossible to distribute aid.

As the death toll continues to rise, Israel faces growing international pressure to end the bombing of Gaza. Even the Biden administration, which has firmly backed Israel’s stated goal of crushing Hamas, has repeatedly admonished Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to minimize civilian casualties.

The death toll in the enclave has been around 20,000, which means 1 out of every 105 people has been killed.

The United States, standing with Israel, has opposed resolutions in the U.N. Security Council that called for a cease-fire, arguing they would allow Hamas, the armed group that controls Gaza, to regroup and launch future attacks, like the massacres on Oct. 7 in Israel that sparked the current war.

There are massive obstacles to the distribution of aid inside Gaza because of the way Israel is conducting its offensive, according to the UN Secretary General.

Senior UN officials and aid agencies have argued that a full cease-fire is needed to allow the distribution of aid to nearly 1.9 million displaced Palestinians, many of whom face disease, hunger and an overwhelmed health-care systems.

A U.N. aid worker and more than 70 members of his extended family were killed on Friday near Gaza City, the same day that aid agencies sharply criticized the U.N. Security Council for passing a resolution that did not call for a full cease-fire in the besieged enclave.

An Israeli airstrike killed Issam Al Mughrabi, who had worked at the U.N. Development Program for 30 years, and his wife, his five children, and more than 70 members of his extended family, Achim Steiner, an administrator at the agency, said in a statement.