By Najib Jobain and Sam Magdy | Associated Press
RAFAH, Gaza Strip — Israel’s war to destroy Hamas has killed more than 20,000 Palestinians, health officials in Gaza said Friday, as Israel expanded its offensive and ordered tens of thousands more people to leave their homes.
The deaths amount to nearly 1% of the territory’s prewar population — the latest indication of the 11-week-old conflict’s staggering human toll.
Israel’s aerial and ground offensive has been one of the most devastating military campaigns in modern history, displacing nearly 85% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people and leveling wide swaths of the tiny coastal enclave. More than half a million people in Gaza — a quarter of the population — are starving, according to a report Thursday from the United Nations and other agencies.
Israel declared war after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, in which militants from Gaza stormed into southern Israel, killing some 1,200 people and taking some 240 hostages. Israel has vowed to keep up the fight until Hamas is destroyed and removed from power in Gaza and all the hostages are freed.
After many delays, the U.N. Security Council adopted a watered-down resolution Friday calling for immediately speeding up aid deliveries to desperate civilians in Gaza.
The United States won the removal of a tougher call for an “urgent suspension of hostilities” between Israel and Hamas. It abstained in the vote, as did Russia, which wanted the stronger language. The resolution was the first on the war to make it through the council after the U.S. vetoed two earlier ones calling for humanitarian pauses and a full cease-fire.
Martin Griffiths, the U.N. humanitarian affairs chief, lamented the world’s inaction.
“That such a brutal conflict has been allowed to continue and for this long — despite the widespread condemnation, the physical and mental toll and the massive destruction — is an indelible stain on our collective conscience,” he wrote on the…
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