For Palestinians, the three-year mark since Oct. 7, 2023, brings another day of misery and difficulties amid an Israeli retaliatory campaign against Hamas in Gaza that local health officials say has killed more than 70,000 people.
Most of the Gaza Strip’s population, which was about 2.3 million people before the war, lives in vast, squalid tent camps, with large parts of the territory’s cities reduced to rubble. More than half of Gaza has now been occupied by Israel’s military.
Despite a ceasefire deal reached nearly a year ago, Israeli strikes are still reported almost daily.
No events were expected Wednesday in the besieged enclave, but Gazans say reminders of how much their lives have changed over the past three years are everywhere.
“We witnessed death, destruction, and bombardment that we had never known before,” Walid Akram, a Gaza City resident, told The Associated Press.
Raed Khozeiq’s coastal neighborhood in Tel al-Hawa was largely flattened.
“No country in the world has gone through what we have experienced here,” he said. “A war of extermination, starvation, the absence of schools and universities – nothing remains.”
Around half of those killed during the war were women and children, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry. Their numbers are seen as generally reliable by U.N. agencies and independent experts. Israel disputes the figures, but has not offered its own estimate of the number of deaths in Gaza.
Since the ceasefire, 1,460 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, according to the health ministry. Seven Israeli soldiers have been killed in that period.
CBS/AP
