Nine-year-old malnourished Palestinian girl Mariam Dawwas is carried by her mother in the Rimal neighbourhood in Gaza City. AFP
Near the US-Israeli so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution site, Yahia Youssef, who had come to seek aid Saturday morning, described a panicked scene now grimly familiar. After helping carry out three people wounded by gunshots, he said he looked around and saw many others lying on the ground bleeding.
“It’s the same daily episode,” Youssef said.
The episode came a day after U.S. officials visited one site and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee called GHF’s distribution “an incredible feat.” International outrage has mounted as the group’s efforts to deliver aid to hunger-stricken Gaza have been marred by violence and controversy.
“We weren’t close to them (the troops) and there was no threat,” Abed Salah, a man in his 30s who was among the crowds close to the GHF site near Netzarim corridor, said. “I escaped death miraculously.”
The danger facing aid seekers in Gaza has compounded what international hunger experts this week called a “worst-case scenario of famine” in the besieged enclave. Israel’s nearly 22-month genocidal war has shattered security in the territory of some 2,3 million Palestinians and made it nearly impossible to deliver food safely to starving people.
From May 27 to July 31, Israel killed 859 Palestinians in the vicinity of GHF sites, according to a United Nations report published Thursday. Hundreds more have been killed along the routes of food convoys.
GHF says its armed contractors have only used pepper spray or fired warning shots to prevent deadly crowding. Israel’s claimed it has only fired warning shots at people who approach its forces, though on Friday said it was working to make the routes under its control safer.
Health officials reported that Israeli airstrikes and gunfire killed at least 18 Palestinians on Saturday, including three whose bodies were transported from the vicinity of a distribution site to a central Gaza hospital along with 36 others who were wounded.
Officials said 10 of Saturday's casualties were killed by strikes in central and southern Gaza. Nasser Hospital said it received the bodies of five people killed in two separate strikes on tents sheltering displaced people. The dead include two brothers and a relative, who were killed when a strike hit their tent close to a main thoroughfare in Khan Younis.
The Gaza health ministry’s ambulance and emergency service said an Israeli strike hit a family's house in an area between the towns of Zawaida and Deir al-Balah, killing two parents and their three children.
Another strike hit a tent close to the gate of a closed prison where the displaced have sheltered in Khan Younis, killing a mother and her daughter, they said.
The hospital said Israeli forces killed five other Palestinians who were among crowds awaiting aid near the newly constructed Morag corridor in Rafah and between Rafah and Khan Younis.
Airdrops expand despite limited impact
To circumvent restrictions on aid trucks crossing overland into Gaza, additional countries joined the Jordan-led coalition orchestrating parcels being dropped from the skies.
Several European countries announced plans this week to join airdrop efforts, though most acknowledge the strategy is woefully insufficient
“If there is political will to allow airdrops, which are highly costly, insufficient & inefficient, there should be similar political will to open the road crossings,” Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, wrote on X on Saturday. “Let’s go back to what works & let us do our job.”
Since Oct. 7, 2023, Israel has killed more than 60,332 Palestinians, most of them women and children, and wounded over 147,643 others, according to the Health Ministry. The U.N. and other international organizations see it as the most reliable source of data on casualties.
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