United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres claimed that the high numbers of civilian casualties reported from Gaza show that there is something "clearly wrong" with Israel's response to the Hamas terrorist organization's massacre of over 1,400 Israelis and the taking of over 240 hostages on October 7.

Guterres has been extremely critical of Israel since the massacre. On Monday, he stated that "ground operations by the Israel Defense Forces and continued bombardment are hitting civilians, hospitals, refugee camps, mosques, churches and UN facilities – including shelters. No one is safe!"

"More United Nations aid workers have been killed than in any comparable period in the history of our organization," he claimed. "Gaza is becoming a graveyard for children. Hundreds of girls and boys are reportedly being killed or injured every day."

The Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry has claimed that over 10,000 people have been killed since the war began, an unknown number of which are civilians. It has also claimed that over 3,000 of those killed have been children. These figures cannot be independently verified.

Israel has killed several thousand Hamas terrorists in the current war, though precise numbers are unknown.

Hamas' strategy in all of its conflicts with Israel over the years has been to embed itself in civilian areas from which it launches attacks on Israel and Israeli forces and to use Gazan civilians as human shields. In this way, it prevents many of the IDF's strikes on legitimate targets and causes international criticism of Israel when it deliberately causes its own civilians to be killed in Israeli airstrikes, as Guterres has done since the war began.

Israel has for weeks called on civilians in northern Gaza to relocate to southern Gaza to escape the fighting. Hamas has demanded that the civilians remain in northern Gaza so they can be used as human shields against Israel.

A significant percentage of the thousands of rockets Hamas and Islamic Jihad have launched at Israel since October 7 have misfired and landed in Gaza, contributing greatly to the civilian death toll in the Gaza Strip.

Israel has struck over 1,400 targets in Gaza over the course of the war as of Tuesday, November 7. This means that even according to Hamas' likely inflated figures, less than one person has been killed on average in each Israeli airstrike since the beginning of the war.