By Agence France-Presse
In a statement on Tuesday, June 17, Gaza’s civil defense agency said Israeli forces on Tuesday killed more than 50 Palestinians near an aid center in the territory’s south, the latest such incident amid severe shortages after more than 20 months of war.
The war since October 2023 between Israel and Palestinian militant group Hamas has ravaged the Gaza Strip, with shortages of food, fuel, and clean water.
Civil Defense Spokesperson Mahmud Bassal told AFP that at least 53 people were killed and some 200 wounded as thousands of Palestinians gathered to receive flour near an aid center in the southern city of Khan Yunis.
“Israeli drones fired at the citizens. Some minutes later, Israeli tanks fired several shells at the citizens, which led to a large number of martyrs and wounded,” he said.
Mohammad Abu Amer, who was present at the scene, told AFP that “ordinary, unarmed people” were targeted.
“They went to buy bread and flour for their children, and (Israeli forces) killed them in cold blood”, he said from Nasser Hospital in the city where the dead and wounded were taken.
The Israeli army said it was looking into “reports regarding a number of injured individuals” from its fire. It said that “a gathering was identified adjacent to an aid distribution truck that got stuck” near the Israeli forces.
In Rafah, also in southern Gaza, the civil defense said four people were killed by Israeli fire and two others by Israeli shelling near a hospital in Gaza City, up north.
Chaotic scenes
Israeli restrictions on media in the Gaza Strip and other difficulties in accessing some areas meant AFP was unable to independently verify the tolls and details provided by the civil defense agency.
The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza denounced “a terrible massacre” as a result of shelling on a crowd of “thousands of civilians” on Tuesday, June 17.
“There are dozens of martyrs who are still on the ground and others who were turned into pieces because of the shells falling directly among the civilians,” a ministry official told a press conference.
In early March, Israel imposed a total aid blockade on Gaza amid an impasse in truce negotiations, only partially easing restrictions in late May.
That was when the U.S.- and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) began distributing aid, but its operations have been marred by chaotic scenes and dozens of deaths.
The UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said on Monday, June 16, that during recent aid distributions, several children have been “temporarily separated from their families due to mass movements around militarized distribution points”.
GHF said in a statement that its teams had distributed two million meals on Tuesday “without incident” and nearly 28 million since it started operating.
At Gaza City’s Al-Ahli Hospital, in one of the last remaining functioning health facilities in the territory’s badly hit north, Amer Abu Safiya told AFP there was little doctors could do to treat a wound on his hand.
“Every day we are being bombed… Al-Ahli Hospital has been destroyed. Medical services are halted. As you can see, there’s nothing to wrap around my hand, and there’s no medication”, he said, holding up his swollen hand while laying down on a makeshift bed in the hospital’s backyard.
Internet down
OCHA said its humanitarian partners in Gaza “continue to warn of the risk of famine in Gaza, amid catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity”.
The Palestinian Authority said internet and fixed-line communication services were down in central and south Gaza on Tuesday, June 17, following an attack on the territory’s main fiber optic cable, which it blamed on Israel.
It’s the third time in less than a week that the internet was partly or fully down in Gaza due to damage to telecommunications infrastructure.
The war was triggered by an unprecedented Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, which resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, according to official Israeli figures.
The Gaza health ministry said on Monday that 5,194 people have been killed since Israel resumed strikes on the territory on March 18 following a truce.
The overall death toll in Gaza since the war broke out on October 7, 2023 has reached 55,493 people, according to the health ministry.
