Over 45,000 people have been killed in Gaza since Israel began its war of extermination in October 2023, Gaza’s Health Ministry said Monday.

Health officials added that tens of thousands of people remain buried under the rubble—and therefore have yet to be factored into the official death toll, and over 106,962 more have been injured.

In a report earlier this year, the United Nations found that 70 percent of those killed in Israeli bombings were women and children.

But even the horrific figures published by the Health Ministry only take into account direct violence by Israeli troops and do not include the impact of mass hunger and the spread of infectious diseases caused by Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s healthcare sector.

In July, a report published in The Lancet estimated that the true death toll of the Gaza genocide could be 186,000 or more—a figure that will have only grown since then.

As dozens of people are killed every single day by Israeli bullets and bombs, and an untold number starve or die of preventable disease, the US and international media has largely blacked out the Gaza genocide, normalizing the continuous mass murder of women and children.

Over the past day, more than 50 people were killed in Israeli airstrikes throughout Gaza. These included 10 people killed in an overnight raid in Gaza City’s eastern Shijaiyah neighborhood. The victims included an entire family of four.

A separate airstrike on Sunday killed 13 people in Khan Younis, officials at Nasser Hospital said.

Israel continues to directly target medical staff, aid workers and journalists. On Sunday, an Israeli airstrike on Gaza’s civil defense agency killed Al Jazeera reporter Ahmad Baker Al-Louh. The airstrike killed three civil defense workers, including the head of the civil defense agency.

“At least 95 journalists and media workers have been killed worldwide in 2024,” said Jodie Ginsberg, the CEO of the Committee to Protect Journalists. “Israel is responsible for two-thirds of those deaths and yet continues to act with total impunity when it comes to the killing of journalists and its attacks on the media.”

Al Jazeera reported that Israeli forces are now attacking the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza, dropping bombs on it after they cut power to the facility.

In an earlier statement, UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell said that 14,500 children had been killed in Gaza since last October. “Virtually all 1.1 million children in Gaza are in urgent need of protection and mental health support,” she said.

Virtually the entire population of Gaza is facing “acute hunger,” Cindy McCain, the director of the World Food Program, said in a post Monday on X. “2M people are facing acute hunger across Gaza. Last month, only 1/3 of trucks needed to deliver @WFP’s food made it into Gaza. North Gaza was hit hardest—just 2 trucks reached thousands of hungry people. Safe, unfettered access at scale is needed to save lives & avert famine.”

In a separate statement, Jonathan Dumont, head of Emergency Communications at the UN World Food Program, said, “The devastation is absolutely staggering.” He continued, in an online message from Gaza, “There’s no electricity or running water or sewage (treatment). Almost everyone has lost their home. A lot of people are living in tents. We have hot meals, distributions. … People come, and they get really desperate. You can see it in their faces and you can see it in their eyes.”

Karin Huster, a volunteer with Doctors Without Borders who worked in Gaza, shared an account Monday of the conditions she saw there.

“It’s kind of hard for me not to cry about this because I don’t think I have seen an army that has been so ... nonstop in its aggression toward a civilian population—and more specifically, toward children and women.”

She continued, “The number of children and women that we see in the emergency rooms of the hospitals that we work in is just mind-boggling. And the number of kids I have seen with amputated arms or legs, or kids who were killed is just mind-boggling.”

She described the massacre carried out by the Israeli army at the Nuseirat refugee camp in June that killed 300 people, using a “hostage rescue” as a pretext. She wrote:

In June, I was working at Al-Aqsa [hospital in Deir al-Balah]. I was responsible for the medical activities there. And the Israeli forces came into Nuseirat camp to free four hostages. When they did so, they killed—you know, call them collateral damage—I don’t know, well over 300 people. I was in the emergency room. We were asked by the director of the hospital to come in.

It was as if I had a 747 [airliner] in the emergency room. There were people of all ages. There were hundreds of people—dead, not dead, legs blown off, people being intubated on the floor, chest tubes being put [in] with no infection prevention control. It was just complete chaos.

She concluded, “None of this destruction was left by chance.” She wrote, “Palestinians in Gaza live on borrowed time. It’s only a matter of time before you die in Gaza.”

With just weeks before incoming President Donald Trump takes office, the Gaza genocide and Israel’s broader rampage throughout the Middle East is only set to accelerate. In an interview Monday, Trump threatened to force Palestinians to accept Israel’s demands, or “it’s not going to be pleasant.”

The ongoing Gaza genocide is accompanied by an escalation of the US-Israeli rampage throughout the Middle East. On Monday, the US Central Command said in a post on X that the US military “conducted a precision airstrike against a key command and control facility operated by Iran-backed Houthis within Houthi-controlled territory in Sanaa, Yemen.”

Israel, meanwhile, is continuing to carry out airstrikes in Syria after the fall of the Assad regime earlier this month, carrying out over 75 attacks beginning on Saturday night.

At the same time, the incoming Trump administration is actively making plans for a possible strike on Iran. Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that “President-elect Donald Trump is weighing options for stopping Iran from being able to build a nuclear weapon, including the possibility of preventive airstrikes, a move that would break with the longstanding policy of containing Tehran with diplomacy and sanctions.”

Israeli officials, emboldened by Trump’s election, are openly discussing plans to annex the West Bank next year. “2025 will be the year of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria,” Israel Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said earlier this month.