Gaza war’s 1,000 days: 90% of strip ‘destroyed’, 80% ‘seized’ by Israel

Israel and Gaza this week marked 1,000 days since Hamas's 7 October 2023 attack, with Al Jazeera reporting on 2 July that 90 per cent of the Gaza Strip has been destroyed and that Israeli forces hold 80 per cent of its territory.

The Gaza Government Media Office, cited by Al Jazeera, put the Palestinian death toll at 73,066, including more than 21,500 children — among them 1,022 babies — with 9,500 people missing and believed buried under rubble, 173,514 wounded, and more than 1,000 killed since the October truce. The war has generated 68 million tonnes of rubble, of which less than 0.5 per cent has been cleared, per the report, which said 223,000 tonnes of explosives — 16 times the Hiroshima atomic bomb — have been dropped on the territory. Al Jazeera also reported that 400,000 people are surviving on one meal daily, that 62 per cent of primary healthcare medications are out of stock, and that life expectancy has fallen to 40 years. “We lost about 85 to 90 percent of our resources, our buildings and our infrastructure,” Gaza City Mayor Yahya al-Sarraj was quoted as saying.

In Israel, the anniversary was marked by sombre commemorations and by protests against the government's handling of events during and after the attack, with Israelis calling on Thursday for a state commission of inquiry into the assault — the deadliest event in the country's history. The first commemoration began at 6:29 am (0329 GMT), the exact time Hamas launched its attack. Al-Monitor likewise reported calls for a state inquiry as the milestone was marked. Al Jazeera quoted Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich as saying: “We need to complete the conquest of the remaining area, defeat Hamas and establish a belt of Jewish settlements.”

Background

The 7 October 2023 attack, in which Hamas-led gunmen killed about 1,200 people in Israel and took some 250 hostages by Israeli counts, triggered the war in Gaza — a coastal strip of roughly 365 square kilometres that was home to more than two million Palestinians and was among the most densely populated places on earth before the war.

A state commission of inquiry is the most powerful investigative instrument in Israeli law: established under a 1968 statute, it is chaired by a judge selected by the president of the Supreme Court, sits independently of the government, and can compel testimony. Successive Israeli governments have faced sustained public pressure to convene one over the failures surrounding 7 October.

What comes next

The central question in Israel is whether the government yields to the renewed calls and convenes a state commission of inquiry. In Gaza, Al Jazeera's reporting frames the reconstruction arithmetic: at the current pace of clearance — roughly 310,000 tonnes so far — removing the rubble alone would take more than 140 years, making the pace of any expanded recovery effort the figure to watch.