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How Would a Humanitarian Pause Work in Gaza?
By Steve Coll,
2023-11-08As the war in Gaza completes its fifth week, the death toll suffered by Palestinian civilians has left behind all precedent in the grim conflict between Israel and Hamas. The daily images from Gaza of flattened blocks, sheared-off apartment buildings, and rescue workers searching through mounds of rubble for survivors evoke scenes from Mosul in 2017, after the heavy U.S.-led bombing campaign there against ISIS. Since Israel counterattacked Hamas after the atrocities of October 7th, more than four thousand children have died in Gaza, according to the Hamas-controlled health ministry. That figure is more than three times all of the combat-related child deaths in Gaza recorded by the U.N. since 2008, when it started keeping count. (The U.N. has not verified the casualty figures released by Gaza’s health ministry, but in the past, a UNICEF spokesman told the Guardian, the ministry’s figures have generally held up under review.) Doctors in Gaza’s hospitals supported by the International Committee of the Red Cross “have never seen this level of mass casualties,” Robert Mardini, the I.C.R.C.’s director-general, told me. An estimated two-thirds of Gaza’s population of more than two million people have been displaced from their homes. “No place is spared by the hostilities,” Mardini said.
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