Halevi admitted that more than 200,000 Palestinians have been killed or injured since October 2023, confirming figures long reported by Gaza’s Health Ministry.
Former Israeli Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi has acknowledged that more than 200,000 Palestinians have been killed or injured since the start of the genocidal war on Gaza, making him the first senior Israeli figure to publicly cite a toll close to the figures released by Gaza’s Health Ministry.
Speaking at a community meeting in the settlement of Ein HaBesor, Halevi said that “not once” during 17 months of operations did legal advisors restrict military actions in Gaza.
The retired general led the Israeli army from the outbreak of the war on October 7, 2023, until his resignation in March this year.
Halevi’s remarks echoed casualty figures reported by Gaza’s Health Ministry, which lists 64,803 Palestinians killed and 164,264 wounded, though thousands remain unaccounted for under rubble.
According to Halevi, this meant that roughly 10 percent of Gaza’s population of 2.2 million had been directly affected by bombing, shelling, or ground assaults.
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International humanitarian groups, including the United Nations, consider the ministry’s data broadly reliable, even as Israeli officials have for months dismissed them as “Hamas propaganda.”
In his assessment, Halevi insisted that the war was conducted with deliberate severity: “This isn’t a gentle war. We took the gloves off from the first minute.”
He went on to suggest that the Israeli regime should have acted “more forcefully” in Gaza well before October 7’s Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.
While he claimed that international law is “very important for the state of Israel,” he stressed that military lawyers had never curbed operational decisions: “Not once has anyone restricted me … (they) will know how to defend this legally in the world.”
The latest figures from Gaza underscore the scale of the devastation. On Friday alone, Israeli occupation forces killed 59 Palestinians, including 42 in Gaza City and the northern areas of the Strip.
The toll among Palestinians seeking food aid has been particularly severe. Medical sources report 2,479 people killed and over 18,091 injured while gathering at aid distribution sites, repeatedly targeted by Israeli fire.
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Despite Israel’s ongoing attempts at mass expulsion, the Government Media Office announced that more than one million Palestinians refuse to leave Gaza City and the northern Strip.
Instead, a wave of what it described as “reverse displacement” has emerged, with over 20,000 people returning north in a single day, defying Israeli efforts to empty the area.
As the war enters its 23rd month, the genocide continues to produce scores of deaths and hundreds of injuries daily.
(PC, The Guardian, Al Mayadeen)
