The high price Gaza paid for Hamas’ October 7 attack

Jerusalem – To be alive in Gaza, is enough to consider oneself fortunate. A Gazan who was injured and lost his home told The Jewish Independent he considered himself relatively lucky.

“Praise to God, no one in my close family was killed,” he said on Friday by WhatsApp from his tent camp in Mawasi in southern Gaza. Hours later an Israeli air strike killed five people in Mawasi, medics told Reuters.

Both sides have paid a very high price for Hamas October 7 attack and the IDF’s onslaught. The indicators of loss on the Palestinian side are staggering.

As of January 14, 46,645 Palestinians have died, according to UN Office for the Coordinator of Humanitarian Affairs, which bases its figures on data provided by the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health. The IDF does not accept the numbers, writing in a response to the Jewish Independent that the ministry “falsifies” the figures. But it declined to offer any numbers of its own.

According to Hamas’s Gaza Media Office, another 11,000 Palestinians are missing or under the rubble of destroyed structures, the OCHA document notes.

The Health Ministry’s death toll is about two percent of Gaza’s population, which OCHA puts at 2.1 million. According to Ministry figures, just over half the fatalities were children, women or the elderly.

The army and its backers say the IDF adheres to international law and does its utmost to avoid harming civilians. It accuses Hamas of using the civilian population as human shields and of hiding munitions in civilian sites such as hospitals and schools..

My Gaza acquaintance, whom I will call Abdul, served as my driver when I visited the Strip frequently for reporting during the second intifada from 2000 to 2005. He and his son, who was wounded in the face ten months ago during an aerial attack in Khan Yunis, are two of the 110,012 people wounded until Jan 14, according to the ministry of health. His family is also among the 1.9 million Palestinians internally displaced: 90 percent of the Strip’s population.

Their first displacement came amid Israeli aerial bombardments of his town near the Israeli border. The family headed southward to Jabalia and stayed there in a school for fifteen days, he recalled, before heading to Nuseirat refugee camp after a friend advised them it was safer there. It wasn’t. The family moved further south to Khan Yunis. In Khan Yunis his unoccupied car was hit in an airstrike.

“You move to find a safe place to survive because you know many people are killed every day,” he told me.

The spiralling numbers of wounded and dead came as the IDF damaged and destroyed hospitals it says were being used as cover by Hamas for headquarters, infrastructure and weapons storage. As of January 14, only half of Gaza’s 36 hospitals were functioning and they were working only partly, according to the ministry of health.

Abdul experienced the dangers of this first hand after he was wounded in the back by shrapnel from a tank shell in Khan Yunis in February.”I lost blood but I’m okay now. It was very hard in the hospital, there wasn’t much medicine, there were people on the ground, there were dead people. It was not like a normal hospital.”

“After two days in the hospital, the doctor told me to leave because there was no space for me. He gave me some medicine, told me to take it with me and said: go.”

Widespread hunger and desperation for food amid shortages and unaffordable prices have taken an enormous toll on Gazans.  Aid agencies and much of the international community blamed Israel, while Israel denied holding up aid and blamed Hamas. According to the OCHA snapshot, 345,000 Gazans were facing catastrophic levels of food insecurity in an IPC projection  for Nov 2024-Apr 2025. 91 percent of Gaza’s population was projected to face high levels of food insecurity classified as IPC PHASE 3 (crisis or above). Israel has criticized IPC reports as displaying persistent failures of neutrality, transparency and methodology

The health crisis would only intensify steadily as the IDF captured or closed major facilities, most recently Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza. Its director Hossam Abu Safieh is being held and interrogated in Ofer prison near Ramallah amid concerns among rights groups about his well being, according to Physicians for Human Rights-Israel. Three Gaza doctors have died in jail during the war, according to Guy Shalev, director of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel.

Shalev told The Jewish Independent that the severe damage to Gaza’s health system is a devastating loss to Gazan society as a whole. The health system was a crucial support in a needy society made up mostly of refugees and their descendants who trusted it more than any other government body, Shalev said. “It employed tens of thousands people and practically every family counted a medical worker. Despite its limitations, it holds the society together.”

Shalev believes the IDF has not made a convincing case that hospitals were infiltrated by Hamas in a way that would make them legitimate targets for military operations according to international law. Rather, he says, the IDF has waged an “intentional and deliberate” campaign against the Gaza health system “to harm the society as a whole” and to encourage flight of the population from areas such as northern Gaza..

The IDF strongly denies this. “The IDF strikes on the grounds of military necessity exclusively. The assertion that the IDF strikes medical facilities deliberately and with the intention of wrecking Gaza’s health system is as aggravating as it is intolerable,” it said in a statement to the Jewish Independent.

The IDF added that it adheres to international law “while taking feasible precautions to mitigate civilian harm” and makes “the utmost efforts to refrain from disrupting medical services in any way during the conduct of hostilities.”

Abdul expects to find that his house was destroyed by the IDF: 69 percent of all structures in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged, according to the UN’s satellite imaging service UNOSAT, cited in the.OCHA snapshot document.

However hard to grasp the magnitude of that and Gaza’s other losses are, there could be more suffering, death and destruction to come--and quite soon. Israel has failed to achieve its stated war objective of destroying Hamas, even though it has destroyed most of Gaza. Voices in the government and the security lobby are already clamoring for more combat, insisting it is necessary and possible to finish off the terrorist group.

“Hamas has paid a heavy price,” Brigadier-General (reserves) Amir Avivi, chairman of the Israel Defense and Security Forum told The Jewish Independent. “Most of its Gaza leadership has been liquidated, tens of thousands of terrorists have been killed, wounded or captured. In a military frame it has been very heavily damaged.”

But, Avivi stressed “we haven’t yet eliminated Hamas as a governing or military body. It still rules among the population. We haven’t finished the work.”

“If we don’t return to combat, Hamas will restore itself and it will be as though we didn’t accomplish anything,” he said.