Gaza City, Sept. 28 -- The arithmetic of Gaza's war is now a ledger of mass death, hunger, and flight. This weekend, the Health Ministry in the enclave said the toll of Palestinians killed since October 2023 had climbed to just under 66,000, a number that would be unthinkable anywhere else and yet, here, arrives with numbing regularity. The count rose after previously unregistered victims were identified and added to the registry, and after another set of bodies was pulled from crushed stairwells and narrow alleys where rescuers say they are too often forced to leave the living to attend to the newly dead.

The figure is not a single moment's snapshot but a composite of days and weeks in which the Israeli military has kept up aerial, arti...