GAZA/JERUSALEM, Oct 24 (Reuters) - More than 700 Palestinians were killed in overnight Israeli air strikes, Gaza’s health ministry said on Tuesday, the highest 24-hour death toll since Israel began a bombing campaign to crush Hamas militants who stunned the country with a deadly Oct. 7 attack.
Israel said it had killed dozens of Hamas fighters in the overnight strikes on the besieged enclave but said its war to destroy the Islamist group would take time.
As aid agencies warned that a humanitarian catastrophe was unfolding in Gaza, French President Emmanuel Macron flew to Israel to offer it support.
I strongly suspect they are providing an upper bound - based on the number of people who live in a particular residence and declaring them “dead” before actually finding a body or confirming they don’t have a pulse. So their numbers always look really high at first and get revised downwards as they move people from the “dead” count to “injured” or “found alive and well”. In many cases, you can observe that they will announce a large number of fatalities within minutes of a blast - faster than it’s feasible to even count the bodies much less confirm they are fully dead and not merely injured.
Context matters. Dead soldiers from an organization that recently committed terrorism and atrocities are not a tragedy. This is the expected outcome of war. There will be civilian fatalities who were in the wrong place or worse being held as human shields. Those civilian deaths are a tragedy, and the best way to prevent them is to strongly denounce Hamas.