Gaza death toll officially over 65,000, Palestine inches closer to ‘real-estate bonanza’

As Israeli troops and tanks advanced further into Gaza City on 17 September, Wednesday, the intensification of the new IDF offensive triggered further mass civilian displacement — just as Israel’s PM Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies have called for — and has drawn mounting international concern. Meanwhile, with the Israeli military having struck the city over 150 times in just the last few days, per its own claims, with airstrikes and artillery fire toppling high-rise towers — including those located near the densely clustered tents of the refugee camps along the seafront — the Gaza health ministry has announced the death toll has definitely crossed 65,000 now.

The Israeli Defense Force claims that these buildings that were pulled down — described famously by Netanyahu as 50 ‘towers of terror’ — housed Hamas observers. However, humanitarian organisations have now formally registered the situation as a genocide and underscored that the offensive has led to a catastrophic humanitarian crisis, with Gaza City now experiencing famine conditions and nearly 90 per cent of the local population displaced.

But that still leaves tens of thousands with nowhere to go.

Pope Leo XIV was one of the world leaders to take note of the renewed mass displacement, expressing his “profound closeness to the Palestinian people” as they “continue to live in fear and to survive in unacceptable conditions, forced once again from their own lands”.

As the Israeli offensive has escalated, phone and internet services in northern Gaza were severed due to Israeli bombardments of communications infrastructure, leaving Palestinians increasingly isolated and unable to summon ambulances — and making it harder for local media to get the word out as well. “The severed phone and internet services hindered the ability of Palestinians to call for help, coordinate evacuations or share details of the offensive,” regulators and local officials have said, per Reuters reports.

According to the Hamas-run health ministry, the official Palestinian death toll in the ongoing war has now surpassed 65,000 — a figure widely cited by UN agencies and independent organisations as a reliable estimate, even as detractors refuse to trust ‘Hamas figures’. Then again, this figure does not account for the missing — surely thousands of them presumed dead, buried in the rubble of Gaza’s cities, be it Rafah or Khan Younis or Gaza City itself.

“Israeli bombardment has destroyed vast areas of Gaza, displaced around 90 per cent of the population and caused a catastrophic humanitarian crisis”, multiple international aid groups — including Save the Children —have noted in a joint statement, echoing calls from over 20 organisations for decisive action to halt the offensive.

Overnight strikes killed at least 16 people, including women and children; most casualties occurred in Gaza City, with additional fatalities reported following attacks on hospitals and refugee camps. At Al-Shifa Hospital, officials said, “More than half of the Palestinians killed in overnight Israeli strikes were in Gaza City, including a child and his mother who died in the Shati refugee camp.”

In central Gaza, Al-Awda Hospital confirmed a strike at Nuseirat camp claimed three lives, including a pregnant woman.

Additional civilian casualties occurred when a strike hit a tent sheltering a family in Muwasi, west of Khan Younis.

And of course, Israeli strikes directly killing is only one of the many ways to die in Gaza. There are indirect killings from starvation and malnutrition, illnesses rendered untreatable due to medical aid blockade and bombardment of hospital and other medical infrastructure, lack of formula... There were reports from the Nasser hospital just two days ago of seven deaths — three premature babies and four foetuses (maternal malnutrition and trauma are among the causes, besides the killing of pregnant mothers).

The Israeli military, meanwhile, claims it has sought to “mitigate harm to civilians”, offering a ‘new route’ south for evacuees, even as it has pledged continued operations against “terrorist organisations” in Gaza.

Nonetheless, the UN Commission of Inquiry, as well as a coalition of leading aid groups, have condemned the campaign as genocide and demanded global intervention: “What we are witnessing in Gaza is not only an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe, but what the UN Commission of Inquiry has now concluded is a genocide. States must use every available political, economic and legal tool at their disposal to intervene. Rhetoric and half measures are not enough. This moment demands decisive action."

The ‘new route’ opened up in a southern corridor ostensibly for civilians to flee along, connecting to other designated routes. Yet many remain trapped — some by choice, others for lack of means or space in the overcrowded ‘shelters’ and camps.

Over 1 million Palestinians lived in Gaza City, per local official figures, before Netanyahu’s warnings to evacuate it began ahead of the expanded offensive into the last, high-infrastructure urban space in the Strip. The Israeli military estimates just about 350,000 people have left the city.

A series of ceasefire negotiations — including the mediation of American president Donald Trump, a key ally to Netanyahu — has failed, after a recent Israeli strike targeted Hamas leaders in Qatar, invited there un supposedly neutral ground for talk, provoking anger from Arab nations and international mediators. Even former Israel ally Turkey has expressed disconcertment.

Hamas political bureau member Ghazi Hamad, appearing on Al-Jazeera, criticised the United States for allegedly siding with Israel, describing the attack as an attempt to upend negotiations. The Hamas negotiating team and consultants were reviewing a US ceasefire proposal, Hamad said, when “less than an hour into the meeting, we heard the explosions”.

Qatar’s ministry of foreign affairs, condemning the assault on Gaza, declared that “the operation marked an extension of the war of genocide against the Palestinians”. As leaders of other Arab nations rallied together in Doha to discuss it, this sentiment seemed unanimous.

Meanwhile, the humanitarian situation in Palestine — not just Gaza but also the Israel-occupied West Bank — continues to deteriorate.

Israel has also struck the Rantisi Hospital for children, forcing half of the facility’s patients — including children in intensive care and premature infants — to flee. “This attack has once again shattered the illusion that hospitals or any place in Gaza us safe from Israel’s genocide,” said Fikr Shalltoot, Gaza director for Medical Aid for Palestinians.

In a shocking statement, Israel’s far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich — recently in India to sign a treaty with his counterpart Nirmala Sitharaman — described post-war Gaza as a “real estate bonanza” and suggested a “business plan” had been submitted to US president Donald Trump for future land marketing and redevelopment.

“We paid a lot of money for this war, so we need to divide how we make a percentage on the land marketing later in Gaza… And now, no kidding, we’ve done the demolition phase, which is always the first phase of urban renewal. Now we need to build. It’s much cheaper.”

Trump had already horrified the world months ago, soon after coming to power in his second term, with an outline of a ‘Riviera’ in Gaza — complete with AI-generated images of a megalomaniac bent.

Smotrich, a key political ally for Netanyahu’s coalition in power in Israel, also called for the continued eradication of Hamas and “voluntary emigration” of Gaza’s population, with hopes of re-establishing Jewish settlements dismantled in 2005.

While the current war on Gaza is ostensibly a ‘self-defence’ manoeuvre by Israel following the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack, which saw around 1,200 Israelis killed and around 251 abducted — of whom 48 hostages remain in Gaza after the various rounds of hostage/prisoner exchanges during past temporary ceasefires — the earliest settler-colonial attacks on Palestinians date all the way back to the Naqba of 1948.

The cycle of violence has left the region in ruins and sparked ongoing global debate over the conduct, consequences and eventual resolution of the conflict — as, even with Western ‘powers’ increasingly inclined to recognise the state of Palestine after decades of calling for a two-state solution, that solution seems to slip further and further out of reach.

After all, as pro-Palestine advocates have pointed out, the average 16-year-old who has managed to stay alive in Gaza (with half of those killed in the latest conflict estimated to be women and children) has already lived through six different wars visited on the Strip by Israel over these last 16 years alone.