The Israeli army said on Tuesday that 82 soldiers had been killed since the start of its offensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. After weeks of heavy bombing, Israel launched a ground offensive in the territory on October 27 aimed at destroying Hamas in retaliation for an attack that Israeli officials say killed around 1,200 people, most of them civilians. The army on Tuesday afternoon gave a toll of 80 soldiers killed, following the deaths on Monday of five troops. Later on Tuesday a statement announced two more had been killed inside Gaza. In nearly two months of fighting sparked by Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel, at least 16,248 people, most of them children or women, have been killed in the Gaza Strip, the Hamas media office said Tuesday.