Israeli forces have killed more than 120 Palestinians across the Gaza Strip in the last 24 hours, medical sources have told Al Jazeera, including dozens of hungry aid seekers, as Israel continues to relentlessly bombard the besieged territory, with the overall war death toll now surpassing a staggering 55,000 people.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said 57 people trying to access aid were killed and more than 363 injured by Israel since Wednesday morning. The distribution points are operated by the controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a US- and Israeli-backed drive in tightly Israeli-controlled zones.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry has described the GHF aid system as a “dramatic success” despite mass killings and scenes of utter human desperation, triggering widespread international opprobrium.
The isolated aid sites – set up in Rafah and in the Netzarim Corridor – have been branded “human slaughterhouses” as more than 220 people have been killed while desperately trying to secure meagre food parcels for their families since GHF started operating on May 27.
The Israeli army has admitted its troops fired “warning shots” in the area of the Netzarim Corridor, where the majority of aid seekers were reported killed overnight.
Gaza’s Government Media Office said the Israeli military “is deliberately creating chaos in the Gaza Strip by perpetuating a policy of starvation and deliberately targeting and killing starving people seeking food”.
The United Nations also condemned the killings and has refused to supply aid via the foundation, which uses private contractors with Israeli military backup in what the UN says is a breach of humanitarian standards.
The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) called the aid distribution model “a distraction from the ongoing atrocities and a waste of resources”.
It reiterated that the humanitarian community in Gaza, including UNRWA, is “ready and has the experience and expertise to reach people in need”.
Israel has banned UNRWA and other legacy aid agencies with decades of experience from operating in Gaza, where a famine looms, while it maintains a punishing aid blockade.
Chris Newton, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, said Israel’s chaotic and violence-plagued aid system is deliberately structured to keep Palestinians desperate and hungry while pushing them southward.
Newton told Al Jazeera that GHF’s stated aim of providing 1,750 calories worth of food per person per day is well short of the minimum standard for crisis situations.
That amount of food is “closer to the ration given in a starvation experiment run in the 1940s in the US than it is to Israel’s own previous 2008 red line for the minimum calories needed to avoid malnutrition in Gaza,” said Newton.
‘A war on children’
Elsewhere in Gaza on Wednesday, dozens of other people were killed by Israeli gunfire and strikes across the coastal territory.
An Israeli attack in Gaza City’s Tuffah neighbourhood killed at least seven people, according to local medical sources.
Three Palestinians, including two children, were killed when an Israeli strike hit a home in northern Gaza’s Jabalia, while in central Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp, three more Palestinians were killed in an Israeli drone strike, which wounded several others, according to the news agency Wafa.
In southern Gaza’s Khan Younis, Israeli air strikes on displacement tents in the Tiberias camp killed four Palestinians, including a child, and wounded others, Wafa said.
Children have borne much of the brunt of Israel’s ongoing assault. Gaza’s Health Ministry said the total death toll from Israel’s war has risen to 55,104 since October 7, 2023 – most of them women and children.
Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud, reporting from Gaza City, said al-Shifa Hospital, like many other health facilities, has been reduced in terms of its capacity to provide proper healthcare to people, let alone children.
UNICEF spokesperson James Elder, who was at al-Shifa, said, “Everywhere we go, this is the same scenario.
“Despite doctors’ most incredible efforts, we see children being brutalised, burned … because it’s a war on children.”
Arrest of Madleen crew ‘arbitrary, unlawful’
In the meantime, Israel continues to hold some of the crew members and activists who were on board the Madleen aid vessel trying to break the Israeli siege. Israeli forces intercepted the vessel and its 12 crew members in international waters off Gaza earlier this week.
While it deported four of the members, including Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, eight others remain in detention.
The group Adalah–The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel called on Israel to immediately release the remaining detained volunteers and return them either “to the Madleen to resume their humanitarian mission to Gaza or to their countries of origin”.
At least two of the detainees were placed in solitary confinement, according to their lawyers, though one – Rima Hassan – has since been returned to the main prison wing.
Brazilian national Thiago Avila was placed in solitary at Ayalon Prison due to an “ongoing hunger and thirst strike” that began this week. “He has also been treated aggressively by prison authorities, although this has not escalated to physical assault,” Adalah said.
Hassan, a French citizen and member of the European Parliament, was also temporarily placed in isolation in Neve Tirza Prison after writing “Free Palestine” on a wall in another prison called Givon.
The UN’s special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, has decried the arrests as “arbitrary” and “unlawful” and also called for the detainees’ immediate release.
The Israeli military says it recovered the bodies of Yair Yaakov and a second captive, whose name has not yet been released, in a joint operation in Khan Younis with the Israeli intelligence agency Shin Bet.
