70% casualties in Gaza are women and children: UN

• The UN condemned the staggering number of civilians killed in Israel’s war in Gaza, with women and children comprising nearly 70% of the thousands of fatalities it had managed to verify.
• In a fresh report, the United Nations human rights office detailed the “horrific reality” that has unfolded for civilians in both Gaza and Israel since Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023.
• It detailed a vast array of violations of international law, warning that many could amount to war crimes, crimes against humanity and possibly even “genocide”.
• It also pointed to “the Israeli government’s continuing unlawful failures to allow, facilitate and ensure the entry of humanitarian aid, the destruction of civilian infrastructure, and repeated mass displacement”.
• The report took on the contentious issue of the proportion of civilians figuring among the now nearly 43,500 people killed in Gaza.
• The rights office said it had now managed to verify 8,119 of the more than 34,500 people killed during the first six months of the war in Gaza, finding “close to 70 percent to be children and women”. This, it said, indicated “a systematic violation of the fundamental principles of international humanitarian law, including distinction and proportionality”.

Of the verified fatalities, 3,588 of them were children and 2,036 were women, the report said.