Israel Turns Gaza Aid Distribution Sites Into Open Killing Fields
As global attention turns to Iran, Israeli attacks on starving Palestinians seeking aid have dramatically increased.
DEIR AL-BALAH, GAZA—With the world’s attention on Iran, Israel’s extermination campaign in Gaza has reached new and horrifying depths. Every single day, starving Palestinians are forced to journey to remote areas to try and get food and attacked en masse, turning so-called aid distribution sites into open killing fields.
The attacks on Palestinians seeking food have dramatically increased over the past week, with dozens of people being shot and shelled on a daily basis. The death toll from the past few days alone is shocking: at least 38 people were killed on Monday, 59 on Tuesday, 22 on Thursday, and 35 on Friday. Over 400 have been killed and more than 3,000 wounded since late May in what the Gaza health ministry calls “aid massacres”—a new term added to the Gaza genocide lexicon.
Ahmed Nejm, a 28-year-old currently displaced with his family of 10 in Deir al-Balah, is in a wheelchair, unable to walk after he was wounded in an Israeli attack on a gathering of Palestinians seeking aid near Wadi Gaza (the Netzarim Corridor) on June 11. He went to the site fully aware of the risks.
“We are trying to manage during this famine,” Nejm told Drop Site. “There’s no bread and no flour. This is what made us go to try and find aid.” He said he arrived with his cousins and neighbors to the site before dawn to wait alongside hundreds of others. Hours later, the Israelis attacked without warning, opening fire with live ammunition and quadcopters. Dozens were killed, including Nejm’s 15-year-old cousin Abdulrahman. Covered in blood, Nejm managed to crawl away as the bullets kept coming. Ambulances were unable to reach the area and he was eventually carried to Al-Aqsa hospital. “We were in an area [the Israelis] had marked as green on the map. I don’t know why they started firing,” he said.
The worst aid massacre came on June 17, when at least 59 Palestinians were killed and over 200 wounded as they gathered to receive flour rations in Khan Younis. Nasser hospital was overwhelmed with casualties. “The medical team responding to the influx of patients had to clear the maternity ward to make space for the wounded, turning delivery rooms into emergency operating theaters. Many of the injuries required amputations to save the patients' lives,” Doctors Without Borders, which was operating in Nasser, said in a statement. “Every day Palestinians are met with carnage in their attempts to receive supplies from the insufficient amount of aid trickling into Gaza.”
“Palestinian lives have been so devalued. It is now the routine to shoot & kill desperate & starving people while they try to collect little food from a company made of mercenaries,” UNRWA’s Commissioner General Philippe Lazzarini said in a social media post on Wednesday. “Inviting starving people to their death is a war crime. Those responsible [for] this system must be held accountable. This is a disgrace & a stain on our collective consciousness.”
The trickle of supplies that the Israelis have allowed to enter has done almost nothing to alleviate the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. Between March 2 and May 27, Israel imposed a full spectrum blockade, allowing no food or supplies to enter. On May 27, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a group backed by the U.S. and Israel, set up a few militarized distribution hubs in the south. The project was condemned by the UN and international organizations as a weaponization of aid. Israel has also allowed a very limited number of UN aid trucks to enter Gaza through the Zikim crossing in the north.
Video of Palestinians in northern Gaza gathering for aid. By Abdel Qader Sabbah.
Since the end of April, the number of meals prepared by community kitchens in Gaza has reduced by 83%. Between March and May, the rates of acute malnutrition across Gaza have more than doubled and the entire population is hungry and on the brink of an all out famine, according to the UN.
“Gaza is the hungriest place on Earth,” Jens Laerke, a spokesperson for the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in televised remarks in May. ”It’s the only defined area—a country or defined territory within a country—where you have the entire population at risk of famine.” Israel, he said, is intentionally preventing the delivery of aid, using food as a weapon of war. “The aid operation that we have ready to roll is being put in an operational straitjacket that makes it one of the most obstructed aid operations, not only in the world today, but in recent history of global humanitarian response anywhere. The blockade and the tight control of the operation is imposed by a party to the conflict—the occupying power, Israel in Gaza.”
The escalating attacks have come amid severe disruptions to internet and telecommunications networks. Israeli attacks in June severed fiber optic cables, causing complete internet connectivity outages with only limited service restored and increasing the risk of a total communications collapse across Gaza. In addition to fewer images and reports emerging from the enclave, humanitarian coordination inside has been severely affected and Palestinians are increasingly struggling to access life-saving information and emergency services or reach friends and family.
“The situation is really difficult at the moment,” Dr. Yahya al-Agha, a physician at Nasser hospital wrote to Drop Site in a message on Friday. “Communications are down in Khan Younis and we are struggling to access the internet,” he said, explaining that he is only able to send messages from certain locations using an eSIM to connect to Israeli cell networks.
UNICEF spokesperson James Elder, who was recently in Gaza, said in a statement the communications blackout is directly contributing to the massacres. “There have been instances where information [was] shared that a [distribution] site is open, but then it’s communicated on social media that they’re closed, but that information was shared when Gaza’s internet was down and people had no access to it,” he said.
Meanwhile no fuel has entered Gaza for more than 100 days, threatening a complete shutdown of field hospitals, supply deliveries, and critical medical equipment, with the UN warning that care units essential for births and medical emergencies will shut down and newborns dependent on ICU machines will suffocate.
The Israeli military continues to issue mass displacement orders and expand so-called combat zones, including one announcement on June 13 that covered vast segments of all five governorates in the Gaza Strip and one today covering large swathes of Gaza City. Over 82% of the Gaza Strip has been designated a red zone since March 18, when Israel resumed its full scale genocidal assault and more than 680,000 people have been newly displaced over the past three months.
The confirmed health ministry death toll since the start of the genocide now stands at over 55,700—5,400 of them killed since March 18—numbers acknowledged to be vast undercounts, with many thousands missing under the rubble.
Israeli attacks on civilians trying to access food have occurred both at GHF aid distribution points and in non-GHF areas where thousands have gathered to wait for the trickle of UN aid trucks that have been allowed into Gaza.
Ahmed Matar, a 20-year-old former information technology student at Al-Aqsa University, was killed on June 10, as he waited to receive aid near the Netzarim Corridor on Rashid street, a coastal road. Desperate for food, he arrived there at 4:30 in the morning after hearing trucks carrying aid would arrive early that morning, according to his cousin Nayfah Matar, 20. At 6:00 a.m, the Israeli military opened fire and bombed the crowd of thousands that had gathered in the area. Matar was struck in the leg and abdomen and died. A neighbor recognized him and carried him to Al-Quds hospital. “When his father arrived to see him, he collapsed on the spot from the horror of the scene and the shock of seeing his son killed, soaked in his own blood,” Nayfah said. “To this day, his father has not fully comprehended his death.”
“Ahmed is one of thousands who lost their lives due to the war and the Zionist occupation. Their hopes and dreams were destroyed, and they lived the most difficult days of their lives: displacement, oppression, humiliation, and famine,” she added. “The occupation continues to commit endless massacres against Palestinians without pause.”
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I appreciate your continued focus on the horrors taking place in Gaza. The increasing danger of a war with Iran has provided an excuse for the media to ignore these atrocities.
This situation is utterly despicable! Hope the International Criminal Court is paying attention and figures out a way to nab those responsible!