United Nations officials yesterday said a US- and Israeli-backed distribution system in Gaza was leading to mass killings of people seeking aid and urged Israel to let UN humanitarian supplies to the war-stricken territory resume.
Eyewitnesses and local officials have reported repeated killings of Palestinians seeking aid at distribution centres over recent weeks in the territory, where Israeli forces are battling Hamas fighters.
The Israeli military has denied targeting people seeking aid and the US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) has denied any deadly incidents were linked to its sites.
But following weeks of reports, UN officials and other aid providers yesterday denounced what they said was a wave of killings of hungry people seeking aid.
“The new aid distribution system has become a killing field,” with people “shot at while trying to access food for themselves and their families,” said Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency for Palestinian affairs (UNWRA).
“This abomination must end through a return to humanitarian deliveries from the UN including @UNRWA,” he wrote on X.
The health ministry in the Hamas-controlled territory says that since late May, more than 500 people have been killed near aid centres while seeking scarce supplies.
The country’s civil defence agency has also repeatedly reported people being killed while seeking aid.
“People are being killed simply trying to feed themselves and their families,” said UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.
“The search for food must never be a death sentence.”
Medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) branded the GHF relief effort “slaughter masquerading as humanitarian aid”.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday rejected a newspaper report that the country’s military commanders ordered their soldiers to fire at Palestinians seeking humanitarian aid in Gaza.
The military said in a separate statement that it “did not instruct the forces to deliberately shoot at civilians, including those approaching the distribution centres”.
It added that Israeli military “directives prohibit deliberate attacks on civilians.” Israel blocked deliveries of food and other crucial supplies into Gaza from March for more than two months.
It began allowing supplies to trickle in at the end of May, with GHF centres secured by armed US contractors and Israeli troops on the perimeter.
Guterres said that from the UN, just a “handful” of medical deliveries had cross into Gaza this week.
Gaza’s civil defence agency told AFP that 65 Palestinians had been killed yesterday by Israeli strikes or fire across the Palestinian territory, including 10 who were waiting for aid.
The Israeli military told AFP it was looking into the incidents, and denied its troops fired in one of the locations in central Gaza where rescuers said one aid seeker was killed. Civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal said that six people were killed in southern Gaza near one of the distribution sites operated by GHF, and one more in a separate incident in the centre of the territory, where the army denied shooting “at all”. Another three people were killed by a strike while waiting for aid southwest of Gaza City, Bassal said.
Elsewhere, eight people were killed “after an Israeli air strike hit Osama Bin Zaid School, which was housing displaced persons” in northern Gaza.
MSF said that in the week of June 8, shortly after GHF opened a distribution site in central Gaza’s Netzarim corridor, the MSF field hospital in nearby Deir el-Balah saw a 190 percent increase in bullet wound cases compared to the previous week.
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