GAZA STRIP: The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said Tuesday that 47,107 people had been killed in the Israel-Hamas war, with the toll continuing to rise in spite of a ceasefire as new bodies were found under the rubble.
The ceasefire has held since going into effect on Sunday, bringing a halt to more than 15 months of fighting in the Palestinian territory.
But the health ministry is finding more dead, as the truce has allowed people to comb the ruins. Other people have died from wounds received before the fighting stopped, with the territory’s health system devastated by the war.
The bodies of 72 people “arrived at hospitals... over the past 24 hours,” the ministry said in a statement.
“A number of victims are still under the rubble and on the roads, and ambulances and civil protection teams are unable to reach them,” it added.
The ministry said the number of wounded had reached 111,147 since the start of the war on October 7, 2023.
The ministry called on the families of people killed or missing in the war to register online to aid in the identification of bodies and to compile a more accurate death toll.
Israel has regularly questioned the credibility of the ministry’s figures, although the United Nations deems them reliable.
A study in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet published in early January estimated that the number of deaths during the first month of the war was around 40 percent higher than the official ministry figure.