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“Gaza is one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history,” said a U.S. military historian as Israel’s use of arms including 2,000-pound “bunker-buster” bombs pushed the Palestinian death toll over 20,000.

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As the Palestinian death toll from Israel’s 10-week annihilation of the Gaza Strip passed 20,000, warfare experts said this weekend that the retaliatory campaign ranks among the deadliest and most destructive in modern history.

Gaza health officials said Friday that 390 Palestinians were killed and 734 others wounded in the besieged strip over the previous 48 hours, driving the death toll from 77 days of near-relentless Israeli attacks to 20,057, with another 53,320 people injured. More than 6,000 women and over 8,000 children have been killed—approximately 70% of all fatalities.

That’s more than twice the number of civilians—and over 14 times as many children—as Russian forces have killed in Ukraine since February 2022.

Thousands more Palestinians are missing and feared buried beneath the rubble of the hundreds of thousands of buildings destroyed or damaged by Israeli bombardment.

“The scale of Palestinian civilian deaths in such a short period of time appears to be the highest such civilian casualty rate in the 21st century,” Michael Lynk, who served as the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories from 2016 to 2022, told The Washington Post on Saturday.

In 75 days, Israel killed 20,000 Palestinians and obliterated 308,000 homes in Gaza. That's 70% of the residential buildings in Gaza.

To put it in perspective, it's as if over 100 million homes in the USA were destroyed.

This is beyond warfare; it's a deliberate genocide.… pic.twitter.com/qKopPpE0mX

— أدهم أبو سلمية