Israeli forces kill 92 aid seekers in Gaza as 19 people starve to death
Israeli forces have killed at least 115 Palestinians across Gaza, including 92 people who were shot dead while trying to get food at the Zikim crossing in the north and aid points in Rafah and Khan Younis in the south.
The killings on Sunday came as Israel’s continued siege of Gaza worsened a hunger crisis, with health authorities there announcing at least 19 deaths from starvation over the past day.
In Zikim, Israeli forces shot at least 79 Palestinians, according to medical sources, as large crowds gathered there in the hopes of getting flour from a United Nations aid convoy. Nine more were killed near an aid point in Rafah, where 36 others had lost their lives just 24 hours earlier. Four more were killed near a second aid site in Khan Younis, according to the Palestinian Civil Defence.
Rizeq Betaar, a Palestinian man who survived the attack at Zikim, helped carry one young victim to the hospital. “We saw this young man lying on the ground, and we were the ones who carried him on the bicycle. We’re trying to get him to help. But there is nothing,” Betaar said. “There are no ambulances, no food, no life, no way to live any more. We’re barely hanging on.”
The violence came despite assurances from Israel that operational conditions for humanitarian agencies in Gaza would improve, the WFP said, including that armed forces would not be present nor engage along convoy routes.
“Gaza’s hunger crisis has reached new levels of desperation. People are dying from lack of humanitarian assistance. Malnutrition is surging with 90,000 women and children in urgent need of treatment. Nearly one person in three is not eating for days,” the WFP warned.
Al Jazeera’s Hind Khoudary, reporting from central Gaza, said that a 35-day-old baby in Gaza City and a four-month-old child in Deir el-Balah had died of malnutrition at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital.
“The mother was touching her body, saying, ‘I am sorry I could not feed you,'” Khoudary said.
Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said staff in Gaza are sending desperate messages about the lack of food.
“All man-made, in total impunity. Food is available only a few kilometres away,” he wrote on X, adding that UNRWA has enough supplies at the border to feed Gaza for three months.
But Israel has been blocking aid since March 2.
The US-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) also denounced Israel’s continuous attacks on aid seekers.
“The escalating massacres of starving Palestinian women, children and men murdered with US-supplied weapons and with the complicity of our government as they desperately search for food to feed their families is not only a human tragedy, it is also an indictment of a Western political order that has enabled this genocide through inaction and indifference,” said Nihad Awad, CAIR’s national executive director.
“Western governments cannot claim ignorance.
They are watching in real time as innocent civilians
are intentionally starved, forcibly displaced, and
slaughtered – and are choosing to do nothing. History
will long remember the Western world’s indifference to
the forced starvation, ethnic cleansing and genocide
in Gaza.