Israeli fire kills at least 18 in Gaza

Hospitals in Gaza reported the killing of more than a dozen people, eight of them food-seekers, by Israeli fire on Saturday as Palestinians endured severe risks in their search for food amid airdrops and restrictions on overland aid delivery.
Near a Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution site, Yahia Youssef, who had come to seek aid Saturday morning, described a panicked scene now grimly familiar. After helping carry out three people wounded by gunshots, he said he looked around and saw many others lying on the ground bleeding.
“It’s the same daily episode,” Youssef said.
In response to questions about several eyewitness accounts of violence at the northernmost of the Israeli-backed American contractor’s four sites, the GHF media office said “nothing (happened) at or near our sites”.
The episode came a day after US officials visited one site and US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee called GHF’s distribution “an incredible feat”. International outrage has mounted as the group’s efforts to deliver aid to hunger-stricken Gaza have been marred by violence and controversy.
“We weren’t close to them (the troops) and there was no threat,” Abed Salah, a man in his 30s who was among the crowds close to the GHF site near Netzarim corridor, said. “I escaped death miraculously.”
The danger facing aid seekers in Gaza has compounded what international hunger experts this week called a “worst-case scenario of famine” in the besieged enclave. Israel’s nearly 22-month military offensive against Hamas has shattered security in the territory of some 2 million Palestinians and made it nearly impossible to deliver food safely to starving people.
From May 27 to July 31, 859 people were killed in the vicinity of GHF sites, according to a United Nations report published Thursday. Hundreds more have been killed along the routes of food convoys.
Israel and GHF have said they have only fired warning shots and that the toll has been exaggerated.
GHF says its armed contractors have only used pepper spray or fired warning shots to prevent deadly crowding. Israel’s military has said it has only fired warning shots at people who approach its forces, though on Friday said it was working to make the routes under its control safer.
Health officials reported that Israeli airstrikes and gunfire killed at least 18 Palestinians on Saturday, including three whose bodies were transported from the vicinity of a distribution site to a central Gaza hospital along with 36 others who were wounded.
Officials said 10 of Saturday’s casualties were killed by strikes in central and southern Gaza. Nasser Hospital said it received the bodies of five people killed in two separate strikes on tents sheltering displaced people. The dead include two brothers and a relative, who were killed when a strike hit their tent close to a main thoroughfare in Khan Younis.
The Gaza health ministry’s ambulance and emergency service said an Israeli strike hit a family house in an area between the towns of Zawaida and Deir al-Balah, killing two parents and their three children.
Another strike hit a tent close to the gate of a closed prison where the displaced have sheltered in Khan Younis, killing a mother and her daughter, they said.
The hospital said Israeli forces killed five other Palestinians who were among crowds awaiting aid near the newly constructed Morag corridor in Rafah and between Rafah and Khan Younis.
Israel’s military did not immediately respond to questions about the strikes or deaths near the aid sites.