Gaza’s civil defence agency has said Israeli troops have killed 20 people waiting to collect food, the latest deadly incident near a US-backed aid centre in the Palestinian territory’s south.
Civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal said Israeli forces opened fire near the Al-Alam roundabout in the southern city of Rafah, where many were waiting to reach an aid distribution site.
Mr Bassal said that “20 martyrs and more than 200 wounded by occupation gunfire” were taken to nearby hospitals.
The Israeli military said it was looking into the report.
According to the rescue agency, dozens of Palestinians have been killed while trying to reach distribution points operated by the US and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) since it began operating in late May.
The civil defence agency said more than 20 Palestinians were killed on Saturday near another GHF site.
Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the United Nations Palestinian refugees agency UNRWA, said in a post on X: “Scores of people have been killed & injured in the past days, including of starving people trying to get some food from a lethal distribution system.”
Before the new system was set up, aid had been distributed to Gaza’s 2.3 million residents mainly by UN agencies such as UNRWA, which employ thousands of staff inside Gaza and operate hundreds of sites across the breadth of the enclave.
Mr Lazzarini said Israel had not lifted restrictions on UN agencies including UNRWA bringing in aid, despite an abundance of assistance ready to be moved into the enclave.
Israel continues to face mounting international pressure over humanitarian conditions in Gaza, which the UN described in May as “the hungriest place on Earth”.
Before the GHF began operations, Israel had enforced a total aid blockade on Gaza that lasted more than two months.
The UN humanitarian agency OCHA has said that Gaza’s “entire population” of more than 2 million people was at risk of famine.
The UN and major humanitarian groups have refused to cooperate with GHF over concerns it is designed to cater to Israeli military objectives, with an OCHA spokesperson recently calling the US-backed aid operation a “failure… from a principled humanitarian standpoint”.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised in a telephone call yesterday to do more to bring aid into Gaza.
Israeli attacks have killed 5,139 people in Gaza since Israel resumed strikes on the territory on 18 March following a truce.
Israel cut off supplies into Gaza on 2 March, sparking international condemnation.
The overall death toll in Gaza from Israeli attacks since the war broke out on 7 October 2023 has reached 55,432 people, according to the health ministry.
The current stage of the war was triggered by a Hamas attack on Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, according to Israeli figures.
