Death toll in Gaza Strip from Israel-Hamas war tops 45,000, Palestinians say

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — The death toll in the Gaza Strip from the 14-month war between Israel and Hamas militants has topped 45,000 people, Palestinian health officials said Monday, with 52 dead arriving at hospitals across the bombed-out strip over the past 24 hours.

The Gaza Health Ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in its count, but it has said that more than half of the fatalities are women and children. The Israeli military says it has killed more than 17,000 militants, without providing evidence.

With the death toll mounting ever higher, efforts to reach a ceasefire have picked up in recent weeks after repeatedly faltering. Qatar, Egypt and the United States have renewed their efforts to broker a deal at senior levels in recent days. Mediators have said there appears to be more willingness from both sides to conclude a ceasefire.

The Health Ministry said 45,028 people have been killed and 106,962 have been wounded since the start of the war. It has said the real toll is higher because thousands of bodies are still buried under rubble or in areas that medics cannot access. The latest war has been by far the deadliest round of fighting between Israel and Hamas, with the death toll now amounting to roughly 2% of Gaza’s entire prewar population of about 2.3 million.

Among the dead reported in the overall toll were 10 people, including a family of four, who were killed in an overnight Israeli strike in Gaza City, Palestinian medics said.

The strike late Sunday hit a house in Gaza City’s eastern Shijaiyah neighborhood, according to the Health Ministry’s emergency service. Rescuers recovered the bodies of 10 people from under the rubble, including those of two parents and their two children, it said.

Israel claims Hamas is responsible for the civilian death toll because it operates from within civilian areas in the densely populated Gaza Strip. Rights groups and Palestinians say Israel has failed to take sufficient precautions to avoid civilian deaths.

The war began when Hamas-led militants stormed into southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting another 250. Israel responded by heavy bombardment and a ground incursion into the Palestinian enclave. Around 100 hostages are still inside Gaza, at least a third of whom are believed to be dead. Most of the rest were released during a cease-fire last year.

A separate strike on a school on Sunday in the southern city of Khan Younis killed at least 13 people, including six children and two women, according to Nasser Hospital where the bodies were taken. The hospital initially reported the strike had killed 16 people, but it later revised the death toll as the three other bodies had been from a separate strike that hit a house.

Louise Wateridge, a spokeswoman for UNRWA, the United Nations relief agency for Palestinians, said she met with children injured in Sunday’s strike on the the school turned shelter. They included a 17-year-old girl who suffered a severe leg injury and shrapnel wounds. She survived along with her twin sister and three other sisters, Wateridge said.

Their mother died and Wateridge said one of the sisters described “how their mother’s bones were crushed under the rubble. There was nothing they could do to save her.”

Wateridge also met with two siblings aged 2 and 5 at Nasser Hospital where the casualties were taken. Both children have severe head and body injuries, with 2-year-old Julia losing sight in her eye. “There is nothing we can do. We are already waiting for the next attack,” Wateridge quoted a doctor as telling her.

The Israeli military said it had “conducted a precise strike on Hamas terrorists who were operating inside a command and control center embedded within a compound” that had served as a school in Khan Younis. It did not provide evidence.

In central Gaza's Nuseirat urban refugee camp, mourners gathered for the funeral of a Palestinian journalist working for the Qatari-based Al Jazeera TV network who was killed Sunday in a strike on a point for Gaza's civil defense agency. They carried his body through the street from the hospital, his blue bulletproof vest resting atop.

The strike also killed three civil defense workers, including the local head of the agency, according to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital. The civil defense is Gaza’s main rescue agency and operates under the Hamas-run government.

Al Jazeera said Ahmad Baker Al-Louh, 39, had been covering rescue operations of a family wounded in an earlier bombing when he was killed.

The International Federation of Journalists said last week that 104 journalists and media workers have been killed so far in 2024, with more than half of them perishing during the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip.

The group said that since the Oct. 7, 2023, start of the war, at least 138 had been killed, including 55 Palestinian media professionals in the calendar year.

The Israeli military said its strike had targeted Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants “who were operating in a command and control center embedded in the offices of the ‘Civil Defense’ organization in Nuseirat.” It accused the journalist of having been a member of Islamic Jihad, an accusation his colleagues in Gaza denied.

Gaza's civil defense also rejected the claims that militants had been operating from the site.

“We were stunned by the Israeli occupation statement,” Mahmoud al-Lawh, the journalist’s cousin, told The Associated Press. “These claims are lies and misleading to cover up this crime.”

Magdy reported from Cairo

Follow AP’s war coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war

Israelis protest against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government and call for the release of hostages held in the Gaza Strip by the Hamas militant group, in Tel Aviv, Israel, Saturday, Dec. 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Tsafrir Abayov)

Israelis protest against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government and call for the release of hostages held in the Gaza Strip by the Hamas militant group, in Tel Aviv, Israel, Saturday, Dec. 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Tsafrir Abayov)

Israelis protest against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government and call for the release of hostages held in the Gaza Strip by the Hamas militant group, in Tel Aviv, Israel, Saturday, Dec. 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Tsafrir Abayov)

A dead child is carried into the Al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital in Deir al-Balah after an Israeli army strike in the Bureij refugee camp, central Gaza Strip, Saturday Dec. 14, 2024.(AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)

Palestinians carry the body of a relative killed in the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip at a hospital in Deir al-Balah, Sunday, Dec. 15, 2024. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)

Palestinians pray next to the bodies of their relatives killed in the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip, at a hospital in Deir al-Balah, Sunday, Dec. 15, 2024. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)

Palestinians mourn over the bodies of civil defense workers victims of an Israeli army strike in the Nuseirat camp, at the Al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza Strip, Sunday Dec.16, 2024. Four cicivil defence workers were killed according to Palestinian civil defense and health ministry.(AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)

BELGRADE, Serbia (AP) — Serbia’s secret service and police have been spying on journalists and opposition activists by installing a spyware on their mobile phones, Amnesty International said Monday.

The watchdog's report, backed by testimonies of those who claim their phones have been hacked in recent months, says the spy software was used to unlock phones to capture covert screenshots and copy contact lists, which were then uploaded to a government-controlled server.

The report titled “A Digital Prison: Surveillance and the Suppression of Civil Society in Serbia" said the Serbian police and the Security Information Agency (BIA) used the spyware to infect devices while their owners were detained or interviewed by police.

“Our investigation reveals how Serbian authorities have deployed surveillance technology and digital repression tactics as instruments of wider state control and repression directed against civil society,” said Dinushika Dissanayake, Amnesty International’s deputy regional director for Europe.

Serbia’s police did not respond to a request for comment by The Associated Press.

Serbia's spy agency said on its website that it “works exclusively in accordance with the laws of the Republic of Serbia.”

“Therefore, we are not even able to comment on nonsensical allegations from their (Amnesty) text, just as we do not normally comment on similar content," BIA said.

The Amnesty report comes as President Aleksandar Vucic is facing one of the biggest challenges to more than a decade of his increasingly autocratic rule, with widening anti-government protests that so far have been largely peaceful.

Protests have been led by university students and opposition activists following the collapse last month of a concrete canopy at a railway station in the country’s north that killed 15 people on Nov. 1.

Many in Serbia believe rampant corruption and nepotism among state officials led to sloppy work on the building reconstruction, which was part of a wider railroad project with Chinese state companies.

Vucic has accused Western intelligence services, NGO groups and foreign media of conducting a “hybrid warfare” against him and his country by illegally financing the protests.

The Belgrade Center for Security Policy, an NGO group, strongly condemned the authorities’ misuse of digital technologies for surveillance and demanded an immediate, transparent and independent investigation into the allegations reported by Amnesty International. It also called for the prosecution of those responsible within the police and the Security and Information Agency.

“In a country where civil protests are growing in scale, and discontent with the regime is becoming louder, these practices represent a direct attack on fundamental freedoms, including the right to peaceful assembly, freedom of expression, and the right of association,” the group's statement said.

Serbia, which formally seeks European Union membership, has been forging close ties with Russia and China, including their spy agencies in what officials said was a joint action against the so-called “colored revolutions” —- street protests against repressive regimes.

Associated Press writer Jovana Gec contributed to this report.

A woman holds a banner that shows Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, reading: "You have blood on your hands!" and stopping traffic, standing in silence to commemorate the 15 victims of a railway roof collapse five weeks ago, demanding accountability for the tragedy in Belgrade, Serbia, Friday, Dec. 6, 2024. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

People stopping traffic stand in silence to commemorate the 15 victims of a railway roof collapse six weeks ago, demand accountability for the tragedy, in Belgrade, Serbia, Friday, Dec. 13, 2024. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)