Israel abducted starving children at Gaza “aid” sites, then tortured them
1 August 2025
“The worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip,” according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), an international body that monitors food insecurity and the crisis of starvation. Khan Younis, 28 July.
APA imagesThe following is from the news roundup during the 31 July livestream. Watch the entire episode here.
Israel has bombed and attacked areas across Gaza this week, killing at least 640 Palestinians and injuring more than 3,200 between 23 and 30 July, according to records from the Ministry of Health in Gaza.
Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum stated that on the night of 28 July, dozens were killed in the central areas of Gaza, in what residents there described as one of the bloodiest nights in recent weeks.“Thirty Palestinians were killed in Nuseirat refugee camp after Israeli forces struck a number of residential houses,” Abu Azzoum reported.
“Among the victims are 12 children and 14 women, and witnesses say most of the victims arrived at Al-Awda Hospital torn to pieces due to the sheer force of explosions.”
Israel reportedly used booby-trapped robots, he added, “as well as tanks and drones during this attack. But elsewhere in Gaza we also see a relative surge in air attacks, including in the designated ‘safe zone’ of al-Mawasi in southern Gaza, where a father and his three children were killed in an Israeli attack on a makeshift tent.”
Nearly 100 Palestinians were killed on Monday, 28 July, almost half of them killed while trying to obtain food aid, Al Jazeera stated.
The Ministry of Health in Gaza stated that more than 110 Palestinians were killed on Tuesday, including 22 who were shot and killed at food aid points.
On Wednesday, 30 July, medical sources reported that at least 75 Palestinians were killed by Israel, including 63 who were trying to acquire food. More than half of those aid-seekers were killed in northern Gaza near the Zikim crossing, where 270 people were also injured.
That crossing has been yet another area that Israeli forces have turned into a killing field, along with the US-Israeli so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation aid points in southern Gaza.
Al Jazeera’s journalist Anas al-Sharif posted this video of Israeli forces firing on Palestinians near the Zikim crossing on 28 July.
Though Israel allowed a trickle of aid trucks into Gaza this past week, as well as humiliating and dangerous airdropped parcels with the help of the compliant Jordanian army, Palestinians say that not only is it a drop in the ocean compared to the critical need for food, water, fuel and medicine, but that it is a dehumanizing policy that is helping reinforce Israel’s engineered social chaos and starvation across Gaza.On Tuesday, 29 July, the Gaza government media office reported that 109 aid trucks were “subjected to looting and theft as a result of the security chaos that the ‘Israeli’ occupation is systematically and deliberately perpetuating with the aim of thwarting aid distribution and depriving civilians of it.”
The Gaza Strip needs 600 aid and fuel trucks daily, which is the minimum required for the most vital sectors, the media office said.The day before, on 28 July, the Gaza government media office reported that only 87 aid trucks entered, the majority of which were looted “with direct and systematic Israeli complicity.”
The Israeli army then carried out what the Gaza government media office said was a “complex massacre” on Monday, when Israel “initially refused to allow the trucks to enter, then targeted the aid supply points belonging to clans and families, resulting in the killing of 11 security personnel. After confirming their deaths, the occupation authorities opened the way for trucks to enter, only to fall into the hands of criminal gangs and thieves under their direct protection, including drones and live ammunition, targeting civilians.”
On 29 July, Gaza civil defense rescue worker Mohammed Abu Loay filmed himself near the Zikim crossing, where crowds of Palestinians tried to obtain flour from a few aid trucks that entered.
“People are coming back carrying bags of flour and we are going to carry the martyred and wounded from the area people are returning from,” he said.
“May God reward us. They’re all coming back with bags of flour except us. Some carry bags of flour while others carry body bags.”
On Wednesday, 30 July, more than 50 Palestinians were killed and 650 were injured when people headed to receive food aid again near the Zikim crossing, according to the Gaza government media office. Some 112 aid trucks entered the Gaza Strip that day, most of which were subjected to looting and theft, the media office added.“This bloody massacre, and previous similar crimes, once again confirm that the occupation is using hunger as a weapon of war, cold-bloodedly targeting civilians seeking [sustenance], in flagrant violation of all international and humanitarian laws,” the media office said.
Dangerous airdrops
While continuing to deny that it is intentionally starving Palestinians, the Israeli army bragged that it dropped aid parcels into Gaza this week.
The Gaza government media office said that Israel carried out six airdrops on Tuesday.
Of those six, “four fell in areas under the control of the ‘Israeli’ occupation army or in neighborhoods from which citizens had previously been ordered to evacuate, exposing those present to direct targeting and killing. This renders these airdrops useless and even dangerous to the lives of starving citizens.”The media office said that a limited airdrop operation on Monday “did not exceed half a truckload of aid, and it landed in red combat zones east of al-Tuffah neighborhood and Jabaliya, where the occupation army is present. These are areas that are completely inaccessible to civilians.”
Several European states also announced that they would take part in airdropping aid, instead of forcing Israel to end the siege and open the land crossings.
Belgium announced that it was sending one plane, carrying medical supplies and food worth about $690,000, to Jordan “soon,” and that Belgian officials would remain on standby to conduct further drops in coordination with Amman.
This comes after Spain and Germany announced that they would also begin working with Jordanian officials to coordinate airdrops.
But, as Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor stated, “Addressing the starvation in Gaza cannot be achieved through superficial or gaudy measures but requires an immediate end to the blockade and the opening of safe, stable land corridors to enable the regular and sufficient delivery of food, medicine and fuel.”“The only real solution [is] safe, protected land corridors for aid delivery, under UN supervision,” Euro-Med added. “Four hundred aid centers once operated in Gaza before Israel dismantled them. They must be restored. Anything less – including these air spectacles – is complicity in genocide. Airdrops aren’t about saving lives; they’re about masking a war crime and preserving control.”
Children abducted, imprisoned and tortured for information
Meanwhile, Israeli and American mercenary forces operating the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation sites continue to trap, injure and kill starving Palestinians every day.
More than 1,200 Palestinians have been killed and more than 8,000 have been injured trying to obtain aid since the GHF began its operations on 27 May, according to the health ministry in Gaza.
A group of children who were kidnapped in late June by Israeli forces at a Gaza Humanitarian Foundation site in Rafah, in southern Gaza, were released this past week and described their brutal torture and detention in Israel’s Sde Teiman concentration camp.
According to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, these 10 children joined thousands of other starving people desperately seeking food aid. However, PCHR reports, “they found themselves arrested after facing the risk of death under the Israeli army’s fire.”According to information obtained by PCHR, the children returned in miserable condition.
One of the children testified to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights that at the time of the kidnapping, the Israeli soldiers beat him with his hands and a stick and forced him to take off his clothes. He said that he and the other children were all placed inside metal cages that were one square meter large, where it was impossible to lay down or sit comfortably, and were given rotten food to eat.
“They then took me to a barrack containing four rooms with steel mesh roofs and concrete floors,” the child said. “The rooms had beds without mattresses and only one blanket. We were forced to remain seated on the beds all day and were not allowed to move.”
The child said that he was interrogated for a full week, with daily sessions of four-hour questioning about “Hamas, tunnels, hostages, cameras, handmade bombs, and identifying houses in my residential area.”
The Israeli interrogator, the child explained, “was dissatisfied with my answers because I had no answers to his questions. He beat me with his hands while my hands and feet were tied to a chair. Sometimes the interrogation was done without anger or threats, because the investigator already knew detailed information about my family, which made me fear for them.”
The child was taken to what is known as the “disco room,” where Hebrew-language songs “were played loudly, and the air conditioner was set to a high temperature. I was blindfolded and my hands and feet were tied to a pipe all day. I remained there for seven days on the floor,” he said.
Another American mercenary has spoken out about the death traps masquerading as the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation for the second time in as many weeks.
Speaking to the news program Democracy Now! on Tuesday, Anthony Aguilar said what Palestinians and human rights defenders have been saying since the GHF opened its killing fields in late May: that these sites are designed to lure, trap, hunt and kill Palestinians with impunity.
Starvation catastrophe
As of 30 July, Israel’s engineered starvation in Gaza has killed at least 154 Palestinians, including 89 children, according to records by the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza.
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC, an international body which monitors food insecurity and the crisis of starvation, warned this week, “The worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip.”
“Mounting evidence shows that widespread starvation, malnutrition, and disease are driving a rise in hunger-related deaths,” the IPC stated, adding that the latest data “indicates that famine thresholds have been reached for food consumption in most of the Gaza Strip and for acute malnutrition in Gaza City.”
One in three individuals is going without food for days at a time, the IPC stated. Between May and July 2025, the proportion of households experiencing extreme hunger has doubled, and the food consumption threshold for famine, what is known as “Phase 5,” has already been passed “for most areas of the Gaza Strip.”
The IPC said that “immediate action must be taken to alleviate the catastrophic suffering of people in Gaza. This includes scaling up the flow of goods, restoring basic services, and ensuring safe, unimpeded access to sufficient life-saving assistance. None of this is possible unless there is a ceasefire.”
For infants and children, the effects of severe malnutrition and starvation are becoming catastrophic. Ahmad Al-Farra, the director of pediatrics and maternity at Nasser Medical Complex, told Al Jazeera on Tuesday that his staff are seeing babies so malnourished that they don’t have muscles and fat tissue anymore, just skin over bones.
Al-Farra said that babies with severe malnutrition are experiencing decreased pancreatic enzyme secretions, leaving them more prone to lethal infections. The long-term effects of the lack of folic acid, B1 complex vitamins and fatty acids that are essential for the composition of the central nervous system can also hinder or stop critical neurological developments, and, if they survive, it can make it hard for a child to read or write, or achieve normal cognitive growth later in childhood.
The baby Zeinab Abu Halib died from being starved by Israel this week.
Dr. Tanya Haj Hassan, a physician with Doctors Without Borders, told Al Jazeera that serious health risks remain even after food becomes available again.
“All of the cells in your body are altered by this. In the intestines, the cells die,” she said, adding that heart cells become weak and thinned, absorption of vitamins and fats becomes difficult and children often die of heart failure, even when they’re being re-fed.
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reported this week that another vulnerable population, Palestinian elders, are also dying from starvation.
“Approximately 1,200 elderly Palestinians have died in the past two months due to Israel’s starvation policy, malnutrition, and lack of medical care, all of which have intensified in recent days,” but the actual death toll may be significantly higher, Euro-Med says.
“In reality, these deaths result from deliberate starvation policies and the systematic dismantling of the health system, forming a pattern of intentional killing prohibited under international humanitarian and criminal law.”
Highlighting resilience
Finally, as we always do, we wanted to highlight people expressing joy, determination and resilience across Palestine and around the world.
Musician and music teacher Ahmed Muin posted this video of a lesson with two of his students.
“Despite the hardship and the shadow of war, my students Amal and Sarah have shown incredible dedication. For the past four months, they’ve been training with me, and their progress has been remarkable – now playing with confidence and emotion. In the darkest times, music remains our light,” Muin writes.