I so look forward to someone coming in here telling us that we can’t trust those numbers because they come from Hamas, as if Israel hasn’t been bombing the ever-loving fuck out of Gaza.

Ten months into Israel’s war on Gaza, the death toll has passed 40,000, according to health authorities there. Most of the dead are civilians and the total represents nearly 2% of Gaza’s prewar population, or one in every 50 residents.

Those left behind by each attack have to deal not only with their grief, but the trauma of living on in the shadow of death and the constant threat of another attack.

In November an airstrike destroyed Ali Abbas’s apartment building, killing two of his children, Fatima, 17, and Omar, five, his brother and two nieces, one of them just 20 days old. There was no evacuation order or warning.

Abbas was so badly injured he spent two weeks in intensive care, initially shielded from news about his children’s deaths. When he was told, he tried to disconnect all the tubes keeping him alive. What is left of their family now lives in a tent.

“I always say we should go to stay in my mother’s house. But my son refuses because he has developed a phobia of buildings and walls, and he is afraid of the dark because the building collapsed on top of us when it was bombed, and people had to pull him out from under the rubble.

“I wake up to his screaming. He usually has nightmares that he is still under the rubble and he begs: ‘Help me, help get me out, please!’”

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