Seventy thousand dead. That is the number the United Nations special committee and commission of inquiry have now put on the record for Gaza. By December 2025, at least 70,117 Palestinians have been killed. Half of them are women and children. The figure is not a tally of combatants. It is a count of civilians, systematically destroyed.
The International Association of Genocide Scholars has used the word genocide. So have multiple human rights groups. So has a UN commission. This is not a disputed label anymore. It is a legal finding, backed by evidence of mass killings, deliberate starvation, and the infliction of serious bodily and mental harm. The commission has called for accountability. It has urged the international community to act.
But the numbers alone miss something. They miss how this happened. How a war that began with an attack by Hamas in October 2023 spiraled into a campaign that has dismantled an entire society’s ability to survive.
The targeting of healthcare has been central. Hospitals and clinics have been destroyed. Thousands of people now have no access to medical care. That is not a side effect of war. It is a method. When you destroy the places where babies are born and the wounded are treated, you are not just killing people in the moment. You are ensuring that more will die later, from infections, from untreated chronic conditions, from complications in childbirth. The prevention of births has been cited by the International Association of Genocide Scholars as evidence of genocide. That is a specific charge. It means the destruction of a people’s future.
Healthcare workers have been killed. Aid-seekers have been killed. People who risked their lives to deliver food and medicine have been killed. The UN special committee has documented this. The commission of inquiry has documented this. The pattern is not random. It is consistent. It is deliberate.
The context matters. Gaza has been under blockade for years before this war. It was already a place where clean water was scarce, where electricity was intermittent, where the economy was strangled. The current campaign did not create a crisis out of nothing. It took a population that was already trapped and systematically destroyed what little infrastructure kept them alive.
Starvation has been used as a weapon. The UN commission said so. Deliberate starvation. That means controlling the entry of food, controlling the distribution of aid, controlling who eats and who does not. The result is a humanitarian catastrophe that is not accidental. It is engineered.
Why does this matter now? Because the international community has been asked to act. The UN commission has urged action. The genocide scholars have condemned the actions. Yet the killing continues. The destruction continues. The numbers climb.
Seventy thousand is not a final number. It is a snapshot. The war is ongoing. The deaths are ongoing. The systematic destruction is ongoing. The question the commission has posed to the world is whether anyone will stop it. That question has not been answered.
The evidence is on the record. The legal determinations have been made. The calls for accountability have been issued. What happens next is not a matter of facts. The facts are clear. What happens next is a matter of will.
