More than a dozen people, eight of them food-seekers, were killed by Israeli fire on Saturday, health officials in Gaza said, as Palestinians endured severe risks searching for food amid airdrops and restrictions on overland aid delivery.
Near a 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 others lying on the ground bleeding.
“It’s the same daily episode,” Youssef said.
In response to questions about several eyewitness accounts of violence at the northernmost of the Israeli-backed American contractor’s four facilities, GHF said “nothing (happened) at or near our sites.”
The episode came a day after U.S. officials visited one site and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee called the 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 military offensive against Hamas has shattered security in the territory of some 2 million Palestinians and made it nearly impossible to deliver food safely to starving people.
Seven Palestinians died of malnutrition-related causes in the Gaza Strip over the past 24 hours, the territory’s health ministry said on Saturday.
They include a child, it said in a statement, bringing total deaths among children from causes related to malnutrition in Gaza to 93 since the war began. The ministry said 76 adults in Gaza have died of malnutrition-related causes since late June, when it started counting deaths among adults.
From May 27 to July 31, 859 people were killed near 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 military has said 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. Israel and GHF have said that the toll has been exaggerated.
Health officials reported that Israeli airstrikes and gunfire killed at least 18 Palestinians on Saturday, including three 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.
