62 killed in Gaza strikes

AFP | Gaza City

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Gaza’s civil defence agency said that Israeli forces killed at least 62 people yesterday, including 10 who were waiting for aid in the war-ravaged Palestinian territory.

The reported killing of people seeking aid marks the latest in a string of deadly incidents near aid sites in Gaza, where a USand Israeli-backed foundation has largely replaced established humanitarian organisations.

Civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP that 62 Palestinians had been killed yesterday by Israeli strikes or fire across the Palestinian territory.

When asked by AFP for comment, the Israeli military said it was looking into the incidents, and denied its troops fired in one of the locations in central Gaza where rescuers said one aid seeker was killed.

Bassal told AFP that six people were killed in southern Gaza near one of the distribution sites operated by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), and one more in a separate incident in the centre of the territory, where the army denied shooting “at all”.

Another three people were killed by a strike while waiting for aid southwest of Gaza City, Bassal said.

The health ministry in the Hamas-run territory says that since late May, more than 500 people have been killed near aid centres while seeking scarce supplies.

GHF has denied that fatal shootings have occurred in the immediate vicinity of its aid points.

‘Slaughter’

Medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) yesterday slammed the GHF relief effort, calling it “slaughter masquerading as humanitarian aid”.

It noted that in the week of June 8, shortly after GHF opened a distribution site in central Gaza’s Netzarim corridor, the MSF field hospital in nearby Deir el-Balah saw a 190 percent increase in bullet wound cases compared to the previous week.

Aitor Zabalgogeaskoa, MSF emergency coordinator in Gaza, said in a statement that under the way in which the distribution centres currently operate: “If people arrive early and approach the checkpoints, they get shot.”

“If they arrive on time, but there is an overflow and they jump over the mounds and the wires, they get shot”. “If they arrive late, they shouldn’t be there because it is an ‘evacuated zone’, they get shot,” he added.

Meanwhile, Bassal said that ten people were killed in five separate Israeli strikes near the southern Gaza city of Khan Yunis, east of which he said “continuous Israeli artillery shelling” was reported yesterday.

Hamas’s armed wing, the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades, said they shelled an Israeli vehicle east of Khan Yunis yesterday.

The Al-Quds Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas-ally Palestinian Islamic Jihad, said they had attacked a group of Israeli soldiers north of Khan Yunis in coordination with the Al-Qassam Brigades.

Bassal added that thirty people were killed in six separate strikes in northern Gaza yesterday, including a fisherman who was targeted “by Israeli warships”.

He specified that eight of them were killed “after an Israeli air strike hit Osama Bin Zaid School, which was housing displaced persons” in northern Gaza.