Palestinians mourn a relative, who was killed while seeking aid at the Zikim crossing, ahead of their funeral at Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City. AFP
"Twenty people were killed and dozens injured around midnight last night in a truck carrying aid overturned... while hundreds of civilians were waiting for aid," the agency's spokesperson Mahmud Bassal told AFP.
The incident took place near the Nuseirat refugee camp, as the truck was driving on an unsafe road that Israel had previously bombed, Bassal added.
Gaza Government Media Office accused Israel of forcing truck drivers to take dangerous routes to reach aid distribution centres, and to intentionally engineer starvation and chaos.
Israel "forces drivers to navigate routes overcrowded with starving civilians who have been waiting for weeks for the most basic necessities,"the office said in a statement.
"This often results in desperate crowds swarming the trucks," it added.
On Tuesday, Israeli forces killed 81 Palestinians across Gaza, among them 57 starving civilians who had gathered at aid distribution points in desperate search for food.
Driven by hunger, thousands of Palestinians continue to flock daily to a US and Isreali-backed aid centers, where they face the constant threat of being killed, wounded, or disappearing without a trace.
According to both local and international reports, Israel’s siege and ongoing genocide in Gaza have pushed starvation to unprecedented levels.
The number of deaths from hunger and malnutrition and continues to rise, reaching at least 189—including 95 children—according to medical sources in the besieged Strip.
Since October 2023, the Israeli military has waged a genocidal war on the population of Gaza. Over 61,000 Palestinians have been killed and more than 150,000 injured, while nearly the entire population has been forcibly displaced. The destruction, according to Palestinian and international reports, is unlike anything witnessed since World War II.
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