At least 27 Palestinians were killed and dozens wounded by Israeli fire near a food distribution site in the southern Gaza Strip on Tuesday, local health authorities said.
It is the third consecutive day of similar incidents as Israel attempts to impose a new aid distribution regime on the Gaza Strip, which it has been blockading for weeks.
The Israeli military said its forces had opened fire on a group of individuals who had left designated access routes near the distribution centre in Rafah.
Journalists have not been able to independently the casualty count, but Reuters reports a spokesperson for the International Committee of the Red Cross told the news agency its field hospital in Rafah received 184 casualties, adding that 19 of those were declared dead upon arrival, and eight died of their wounds shortly after.
The UN human rights office said on Tuesday the impediment of access to food and relief for civilians in Gaza may constitute a war crime, describing attacks on civilians trying to access food as unconscionable.
“For a third day running, people were killed around an aid distribution site run by the ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’. This morning, we have received information that dozens more people were killed and injured,” Reuters reports the spokesperson for the UN high commissioner for Human Rights, Jeremy Laurence, told the media in Geneva.
Here are some more of the images being sent over the news wires from the Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, where Palestinians have been holding funerals for the people killed this morning when Israeli forces opened fire near an aid distribution centre.
The IDF said it “is aware of reports regarding casualties, and the details of the incident are being looked into”. It claimed “troops carried out warning fire, and after the suspects failed to retreat, additional shots were directed near a few individual suspects who advanced toward the troops” when they were allegedly not following “the designated access routes” imposed on the population by Israeli authorities.
The media office of the government in Gaza has issued a statement describing the new aid distribution arrangements being forced on the territory by the Israeli government as “mass death traps” as it called the shootings at or near aid distribution centres “horrific, intentionally repeated crimes.”
Hind Khoudary has been reporting from Deir al-Balah inside Gaza for Al Jazeera, and says that witnesses there told her there was “chaos” at the aid distribution point where at least 27 Palestinians have been killed after Israeli troops opened fire.
She reported for the news network that she had been told “There’s no process. There’s no system. You just need to run first to be able to get the food. The Israeli forces just opened fire randomly, shooting Palestinians … using quadcopters and live ammunition.”
Khoudary added that what is being distributed is a “very limited amount” of “flour, oil, lentils and other canned food.”
Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has banned Al Jazeera from operating in Israel.
Lufthansa has extended the suspension of its flights to and from Tel Aviv until 22 June, Reuters reports.
Here are some of the images sent to us over the news wires of displaced Palestinians attempting to collect humanitarian aid under the new distribution system being imposed on the Gaza Strip by Israeli authorities. At least 27 Palestinians were killed and nearly 200 injured earlier on Tuesday when Israeli forces opened fire near one of the distribution points in the south of the territory.
At least 27 Palestinians were killed and dozens wounded by Israeli fire near a food distribution site in the southern Gaza Strip on Tuesday, local health authorities said.
It is the third consecutive day of similar incidents as Israel attempts to impose a new aid distribution regime on the Gaza Strip, which it has been blockading for weeks.
The Israeli military said its forces had opened fire on a group of individuals who had left designated access routes near the distribution centre in Rafah.
Journalists have not been able to independently the casualty count, but Reuters reports a spokesperson for the International Committee of the Red Cross told the news agency its field hospital in Rafah received 184 casualties, adding that 19 of those were declared dead upon arrival, and eight died of their wounds shortly after.
At least ten Palestinians have been reported killed by Israeli strikes across the Gaza Strip on Tuesday morning, according to news agency Wafa.
The dead, it reported, included two children killed in a strike on a house sheltering displaced people in Khan Younis.
Medical sources told Wafa that Nasser hospital had received 32 bodies, including 24 people killed when Israeli forces opened fire near an aid distribution point earlier in the day.
Reuters reports that the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which Israeli authorities are using to bypass the traditional aid groups operating inside the Palestinian territories, said it distributed 21 truckloads of food early Tuesday.
In its statement about troops opening fire on people near an aid distribution point in southern Gaza, Israel’s military has claimed “IDF troops are not preventing the arrival of Gazan civilians to the humanitarian aid distribution sites. The warning shots were fired approximately half a kilometer away from the humanitarian aid distribution site toward several suspects who advanced toward the troops in such a way that posed a threat to them.”
At the weekend Philippe Lazzarini, the Unrwa commissioner-general described the aid distribution system being enforced by Israeli authorities as a “death trap”, adding that “This humiliating system has forced thousands of hungry and desperate people to walk for tens of miles to an area that’s all but pulverized due to heavy bombardment.”
Israel’s military has announced overnight that three soldiers have been killed in combat in the north of the Gaza Strip.
The Times of Israel reports that according to an initial IDF probe, the five troops were in a vehicle in Jabaliya when it was struck by an explosive device. Two other troops were wounded in the incident. 423 Israeli soldiers have been killed in combat inside Gaza since Israel began its ground operation there following the surprise 7 October Hamas attack inside southern Israel.
Gaza’s civil defence agency said Tuesday that at least 15 people were killed in the south of the Gaza Strip – with Palestinian news agency Wafa putting the number higher at 24 – when Israeli troops again opened fire near a food distribution point.
A correspondent for Wafa reported that “Israeli artillery and aircraft fired shells and gunfire at displaced people as they waited for aid” in the vicinity of the Al-Alam roundabout, which is to the west of Rafah. It reported that 200 people were injured.
The IDF said in a statement Tuesday that it shot “a few individual suspects who advanced toward the troops”, claiming that people had not followed designated routes. It said “The IDF is aware of reports regarding casualties, and the details of the incident are being looked into”, adding that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation operates “to enable the distribution of aid to the Gazan residents – and not to Hamas.”
Jake Wood, the ex-Marine who previously headed the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation resigned several days ago, saying the operation could not fulfil its mission in a way that adhered to “humanitarian principles”.
Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s rolling coverage of the conflict in Gaza and the wider Middle East. Here are the headlines …
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Gaza’s civil defence agency said Tuesday that Israeli troops killed at least 15 people in the south of the Gaza Strip. “At least 15 people were killed and dozens wounded … when Israeli forces opened fire with tanks and drones on thousands of civilians who had gathered since dawn near the Al-Alam roundabout in the Al-Mawasi area, northwest of Rafah,” civil defence spokesperson Mahmoud Bassal told news agency AFP. The Palestinian news agency wafa put the number of people killed at 24
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The IDF said in a statement Tuesday that it shot “a few individual suspects who advanced toward the troops” during the movement of Palestinians along the designated routes toward aid distribution sites in the southern Gaza Strip. It said the people deviated from the designated routes
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Israel’s military said three soldiers were killed during combat in northern Gaza on Monday, without providing details. Israeli media reported that they were killed in an explosion in the Jabaliya area. About 860 Israeli soldiers have been killed since the 7 October attack, including more than 400 during the fighting inside Gaza
