People gather around the rubble of a house destroyed in an Israeli strike as rescuers search for casualties on al-Jalaa street in central Gaza City. AFP
"There are three bodies of martyrs that are now with the Israeli side after they killed them," Kamal Abu al-Rub said, citing the office in charge of liaising between Israeli and Palestinian authorities in the West Bank.
The Palestinian health ministry said the District Coordination Office had also informed it of the deaths of "three young men shot by Israeli forces near Qabatiya," which is in the Jenin governorate.
The three men were between 24 and 32 years old, the ministry said in a statement.
AFP journalists on the ground reported that an Israeli army operation was still ongoing in Qabatiya on Tuesday at noon.
The Israeli raids in the West Bank, particularly in the north, have soared since the Israeli war on Gaza broke out on 7 October last year.
Israeli troops or settlers have killed at least 771 Palestinians in the West Bank since the start of the Gaza war, according to the Ramallah-based health ministry.
In Gaza, meanwhile, where the population is experiencing a severe food crisis accompanied by rising prices due to Israel’s prevention of humanitarian aid trucks from entering the strip, four Palestinians were killed on Tuesday, including an infant, by the Israeli artillery shelling of a house in the New Camp area, northwest of Al-Nuseirat.
One man was killed early in the morning when Israeli occupation warplanes bombed a group of citizens west of Nuseirat camp, and two others were killed by Israeli warplanes bombing in the Sabra neighbourhood, south Gaza.
Adding insult to injury, the United Nations reported the theft of 98 trucks, the most significant incident since the start of the war. However, it did not say who was behind the robbery.
UN spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric said the Israeli military instructed the convoy of 109 trucks to take an “alternative, unfamiliar route” after the aid was brought in through the Kerem Shalom crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip, adding that the trucks were stolen near the crossing itself.
Measures against looters
Al-Aqsa TV, a media outlet operated by the militants, said Hamas-run security forces in Gaza had launched an operation against looters, killing 20 of them. The report implied that members of tribal groups near Rafah were behind the theft.
The government had a police force of tens of thousands that maintained a high degree of public security before the war. Still, they have vanished from the streets in many areas after being targeted by Israeli strikes. Hamas says it has taken measures to prevent both looting and price gouging in local markets.
An even more severe hunger crisis is underway in the north, where Israel has been waging a weekslong offensive that has killed hundreds of people and driven tens of thousands from their homes. Experts say a famine might already have set in there.
Israel's offensive has killed over 43,800 Palestinians, with more than half of them women and children, according to local health authorities. The war has left much of the territory in ruins and forced around 90 percent of Gaza's population of 2.3 million to flee, often multiple times where hundreds of thousands are crammed into squalid tent camps.
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