GAZA CITY — On Monday, Gaza’s health ministry released its latest count: five Palestinians killed and thirty others wounded in Israeli strikes over the preceding twenty-four hours. The figure is, by the standards of this conflict, unremarkable. That is the point.
Since the ceasefire took effect on October 11 last year, 1,352 Palestinians have been killed inside Gaza, 4,511 have been wounded, and rescue teams have pulled 826 bodies from the rubble of buildings that were struck while the truce nominally held. Those numbers update daily. Each update makes the argument, without needing to editorialize, that the ceasefire has not stopped the killing. It has only changed the frequency.
The five killed Monday joined a toll that included two children, with strikes hitting multiple locations across the strip. In a genocide that has now claimed more than 73,000 Palestinian lives since October 7, 2023, five deaths in a single day register in international reporting as a low-casualty day. For the families of the dead, no such arithmetic applies.
The 826 bodies still being recovered from rubble are among the most telling of Monday’s figures. These are Palestinians who died in strikes weeks or months earlier, whose remains were buried under collapsed structures that rescue teams, working with depleted equipment, depleted fuel, and depleted personnel, are still extracting. By the time each body is counted in the health ministry’s cumulative toll, the event that killed them has long since left the news cycle. The 826 is not a lag in bureaucratic reporting; it is a physical fact about how much of Gaza has been destroyed.
Since October 11, the ceasefire period has produced a documented accumulation of violence at a scale that international institutions have struggled to respond to adequately. When the International Court of Justice opened its proceedings on the genocide case brought by South Africa, the central question was whether Israel’s operations in Gaza constituted a systematic destruction of the Palestinian people as a group. The health ministry’s cumulative figures (73,000 dead since October 7, 1,352 killed since the truce) are the ground truth beneath that legal question.
The health ministry does not, under current conditions, have the capacity to report who the five people killed Monday were. It does not track how many of the thirty wounded will survive their injuries, or whether the families of the 826 extracted bodies have been located and notified. What the ministry can do is maintain the aggregate count, a number that has become, in the absence of accountability mechanisms that function, one of the primary records of what is happening inside Gaza.
On September 3, Al Jazeera reported that Israeli far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir was still publicly planning the forced removal of Palestinians from Gaza as military operations continued. The day before Monday’s report, an Israeli drone strike killed a Palestinian father and daughter in Gaza City, pushing the post-ceasefire toll past 1,340 as Arab and Islamic states issued a joint condemnation of Israeli displacement proposals.
The ceasefire framework that was supposed to end the fighting has produced, by Monday’s count, more than 1,352 Palestinian deaths since October 11. The 73,000-plus total since October 7, 2023 is the figure the health ministry reports. It does not include those still trapped under rubble, those whose deaths were never recorded in a functioning health system, or those who died from the blockade’s effects on medicine, food, and clean water. Rights groups and investigators have noted that the full scale of the killing almost certainly exceeds even that number.
Five people killed on Monday, according to the ministry. Another update. The count continues.
