In a BBC interview on Friday, President Emmanuel Macron of France, who traveled to Israel last month to show solidarity, called on Israel to end the bombings that are killing “these babies, these ladies, these old people.” .
In response, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said his country is trying to minimize civilian casualties, adding that if Hamas is not destroyed, the violence it inflicts on Israel “will be committed tomorrow in Paris, New York and anywhere in the world.”
The total death toll in Gaza, as reported by health authorities, part of the Hamas-led government, surpassed 11,000 on Friday. Last month, President Biden warned against accepting figures from officials in Gaza, but on Wednesday a senior State Department official told Congress that the actual toll figures “could be even higher than cited.”
The dead included more than 100 staff from a UN agency that supports Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, and at least 40 journalists and other media workers, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. The number of fatalities among journalists is the highest in any conflict since the commission began tracking such deaths in 1992.
Authorities in Gaza have not said how many of the dead were Hamas leaders and fighters, targeted by Israel, but they say the highest toll has fallen on the most vulnerable. More than 4,500 children and 3,000 women have been killed in Gaza since the conflict began, they reported, and nearly 27,500 people have been injured.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry on Friday revised the government’s estimate of the number of deaths from the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7 from more than 1,400 to around 1,200.
Not long after the October 7 raid and the start of Israeli retaliation, Gaza’s hospitals became makeshift refugee centers. Al Shifa in particular housed thousands of displaced Gazans whose homes were damaged or who simply believed that Israeli forces were less likely to attack a hospital than their neighborhoods.