GAZA CITY: Gaza’s civil defense agency said that Israeli forces killed at least 62 people on Friday, including 10 who were waiting for aid in the war-ravaged Palestinian territory.
The reported killing of people seeking aid marks the latest in a string of deadly incidents near aid sites in Gaza, where a US- and Israeli-backed foundation has largely replaced established humanitarian organizations.
Civil defense spokesman Mahmoud Bassal said that 62 Palestinians had been killed on Friday by Israeli strikes or fire across the Palestinian territory.
When asked for comment, the Israeli military said it was looking into the incidents, and denied its troops fired in one of the locations in central Gaza where rescuers said one aid seeker was killed.
People are being killed simply trying to feed themselves and their families. The search for food must never be a death sentence.
Antonio Guterres, UN secretary-general
Bassal said that six people were killed in southern Gaza near one of the distribution sites operated by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, and one more in a separate incident in the center of the territory, where the army denied shooting “at all.”
Another three people were killed by a strike while waiting for aid southwest of Gaza City, Bassal said.
The Health Ministry in the territory says that since late May, more than 500 people have been killed near aid centers while seeking scarce supplies.
GHF has denied that fatal shootings have occurred in the immediate vicinity of its aid points.
Medical charity Doctors Without Borders, or MSF on Friday slammed the GHF relief effort, calling it “slaughter masquerading as humanitarian aid.”
It noted that in the week of June 8, shortly after GHF opened a distribution site in central Gaza’s Netzarim corridor, the MSF field hospital in nearby Deir Al-Balah saw a 190 percent increase in bullet wound cases compared to the previous week.
Aitor Zabalgogeaskoa, MSF emergency coordinator in Gaza, said in a statement that, under how the distribution centers currently operate: “If people arrive early and approach the checkpoints, they get shot.”
“If they arrive on time, but there is an overflow and they jump over the mounds and the wires, they get shot.”
“If they arrive late, they shouldn’t be there because it is an ‘evacuated zone’, they get shot,” he added.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that the US-backed aid operation in Gaza is “inherently unsafe,” giving a blunt assessment: “It is killing people.”
He also said UN-led humanitarian efforts are being “strangled,” aid workers themselves are starving and Israel — as the occupying power — is required to agree to and facilitate aid deliveries into and throughout the Palestinian enclave.
“People are being killed simply trying to feed themselves and their families. The search for food must never be a death sentence,” Guterres said.
Meanwhile, Bassal said that 10 people were killed in five separate Israeli strikes near the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, east of which he said “continuous Israeli artillery shelling” was reported on Friday.
Hamas’s armed wing, the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades, said they shelled an Israeli vehicle east of Khan Younis on Friday.
The Al-Quds Brigades, the armed wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, said they had attacked a group of Israeli soldiers north of Khan Younis in coordination with the Al-Qassam Brigades.
Bassal added that 30 people were killed in six separate strikes in northern Gaza on Friday, including a fisherman who was targeted “by Israeli warships.”
He specified that eight of them were killed “after an Israeli airstrike hit Osama Bin Zaid School, which was housing displaced people” in northern Gaza.
In central Gaza’s Al-Bureij refugee camp, 12 people were killed in two separate Israeli strikes, Bassal said.
The 50th medic from the Palestine Red Crescent has been killed in Gaza since the start of the war, the PRCS said on Friday in a statement.
Haitham Bassam Abu Issa, a nurse at the PRCS clinic in Deir Al-Balah in the center of the Gaza strip, was killed while off duty on Thursday, the PRCS said.
“This brings the total number of PRCS staff and volunteers killed during the conflict to 50 – a deeply shocking figure,” the PRCS said.
Israeli restrictions on media in the Gaza Strip and difficulties in accessing some areas mean AFP is unable to independently verify the tolls and details provided by rescuers and witnesses.
Israel’s military said it was continuing its operations in Gaza on Friday, after army chief Eyal Zamir announced earlier in the week that the focus would again shift to the territory.
The Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that sparked the Gaza war resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.
Israel’s retaliatory military campaign has killed at least 56,331 people, mostly civilians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. The UN considers its figures reliable.
