Eight people seeking food among at least 18 killed by Israeli fire in Gaza
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,' Mr Youssef said.
We weren't close to them (the troops) and there was no threat. I escaped death miraculously Abed Salah, witness
In response to questions about several witness 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 the 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.'
Families of hostages protest Tel Aviv, Israel (Ariel Schalit/AP)
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 near 22-month military offensive against Hamas has shattered security in the territory of some 2.0 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 on 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.
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.
Meanwhile, in Tel Aviv, families of Israeli hostages protested and urged Israel's government to push harder for the release of their loved ones, including those shown in footage released by militant groups earlier this week.
US President Donald Trump's special envoy Steve Witkoff joined them a day after visiting Gaza and a week after walking away from ceasefire talks in Qatar, blaming Hamas's intransigence and pledging to find other ways to free hostages and make Gaza safe.
Of the 251 hostages who were abducted when Hamas led an attack on southern Israel on October 7 2023, about 20 are believed to be alive in Gaza.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the second-largest militant group in Gaza, released separate videos of individual hostages this week, triggering outrage among hostage families and Israeli society.
The war in Gaza began when Hamas attacked southern Israel on October 7 2023, killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians.
Israel's retaliatory offensive has killed more than 60,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza's health ministry, which does not distinguish between militants and civilians and operates under the Hamas government.
The UN and other international organisations see it as the most reliable source of data on casualties.
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The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
Gaza aid truck drivers face increasing danger from desperate crowds and armed gangs
Truck drivers trying to deliver aid inside Gaza say their work has become increasingly dangerous in recent months as people have grown desperately hungry and violent gangs have filled a power vacuum left by the territory's Hamas rulers. Crowds of hungry people routinely rip aid off the backs of moving trucks, the local drivers said. Some trucks are hijacked by armed men working for gangs who sell the aid in Gaza's markets for exorbitant prices. Israeli troops often shoot into the chaos, they said. Drivers have been killed in the mayhem. Since March, when Israel ended a ceasefire in its war with Hamas and halted all imports, the situation has grown increasingly dire in the territory of some 2 million Palestinians. International experts are now warning of a 'worst-case scenario of famine' in Gaza. Under heavy international pressure, Israel last week announced measures to let more aid into Gaza. Though aid groups say it's still not enough, getting even that amount from the border crossings to the people who need it is difficult and extremely dangerous, the drivers said. Driving aid trucks can be deadly Thousands of people packed around the road Monday as two trucks entered southern Gaza, AP video showed. Young men overwhelmed the trucks, standing on the cabs' roofs, dangling from the sides and clambering over each other onto the truck beds to grab boxes even as the trucks slowly kept driving. 'Some of my drivers are scared to go transfer aid because they're concerned about how they'll untangle themselves from large crowds of people,' said Abu Khaled Selim, vice president of the Special Transport Association, a nonprofit group that works with private transportation companies across the Gaza Strip and advocates for truck drivers' rights. Selim said his nephew, Ashraf Selim, a father of eight, was killed July 29 by a stray bullet when Israeli forces opened fire on crowds climbing onto the aid truck he was driving. Shifa Hospital officials said they received his body with an apparent gunshot to the head. The Israeli military said it was unaware of the incident and that 'as a rule" it does not carry out deliberate attacks on aid trucks. Earlier in the war, aid deliveries were safer because, with more food getting into Gaza, the population was less desperate. Hamas-run police had been seen securing convoys and went after suspected looters and merchants who resold aid at exorbitant prices, Now, 'with the situation unsecured, everything is permissible,' said Selim, who appealed for protection so the aid trucks could reach warehouses. The U.N. does not accept protection from Israeli forces, saying it would violate its rules of neutrality, and said that given the urgent need for aid it would accept that hungry people were going to grab food off the back of the trucks as long as they weren't violent. Flooding Gaza with renewed aid would ease the desperation and make things safer for the drivers, said Juliette Touma, communications director at UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees. The danger for drivers is growing Ali al-Derbashi, 22, was an aid truck driver for more than a year and a half, but he quit after his last trip three weeks ago because of the increasing danger, he said. Some people taking aid off the trucks are now carrying cleavers, knives and axes, he said. He was once ambushed and forcibly redirected to an area designated by Israel as a conflict zone in its war against Hamas. There everything was stolen, including his truck's fuel and batteries, and his tires were shot out, he said. He was beaten and his phone was stolen. 'We put our lives in danger for this. We leave our families for two or three days every time. And we don't even have water or food ourselves,' he said. In addition to the danger, the drivers faced humiliation from Israeli forces, he said, who put them through 'prolonged searches, unclear instructions, and hours of waiting.' The war began Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas-led militants killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted 251 others. Israel's retaliatory offensive has killed more than 61,000 Palestinians, according to the latest figures by Gaza's Health Ministry, which doesn't distinguish between militants and civilians and operates under the Hamas government. The threats come from everywhere Nahed Sheheibr, head of the Special Transport Association, said the danger for the drivers comes from everywhere. He accused Israel of detaining drivers and using them as human shields. The Israeli military did not comment on the accusation. In recent days, men linked to a violent Gaza clan fired at drivers, injuring one, and looted a convoy of 14 trucks, he said. They later looted a convoy of 10 trucks. Hossni al-Sharafi, who runs a trucking company and was an aid driver himself, said he is only allowed to use drivers who have no political affiliation and have been approved by Israel to transport aid from crossings. Al-Sharafi said he was detained by Israeli forces for more than 10 days last year while transporting aid from the southern Kerem Shalom crossing and interrogated about where the truck was headed and how the aid was being distributed. Israeli officials did not comment on the accusations. Some drivers spoke of being shot at repeatedly by armed gangs. Others said their trucks were routinely picked clean — even of the wooden pallets— by waves of desperate people, many of whom were fighting each other for the food, while Israeli troops were shooting. Hungry families who miss out on the aid throw stones at the trucks in anger. Anas Rabea said the moment he pulled out of the Zikkim crossing last week his aid truck was overwhelmed by a crowd. 'Our instructions are to stop, because we don't want to run anyone over,' he said. 'It's crazy. You have people climbing all over the cargo, over the windows. It's like you're blind, you can't see out.' After the crowd had stripped everything, he drove another few hundred meters and was stopped by an armed gang that threatened to shoot him. They searched the truck and took a bag of flour he had saved for himself, he said. 'Every time we go out, we get robbed," he said. "It's getting worse day by day.' ——- Associated Press writers Julia Frankel contributed to this report from Jerusalem and Sally Abou Aljoud from Beirut. Mariam Dagga contributed from Khan Younis, Gaza Strip.
Spectator
5 hours ago
- Spectator
The Daughter of Time was worth the wait
That it has taken its sweet time getting here cannot be denied, but, at last, it has happened. More than 70 years after the novel by Josephine Tey became an overnight sensation in 1951, a stage adaptation of The Daughter of Time has arrived in the West End. Voted the greatest crime novel of all time by the Crime Writers' Association back in 1990, The Daughter of Time is Tey's most unusual but brilliant detective story. It's her most unusual because its sees her Inspector Alan Grant – the central character in five of her detective stories – solving a crime from his hospital bed while recovering from a broken leg. And it's arguably her most brilliant because the crime he solves is one of British history's coldest and most high-profile cases – who murdered the Princes in the Tower in 1483. Yet while it's a brilliant book, because most of the action happens either inside Grant's head or in his hospital room, it has probably been judged undramatisable – until now. Playing at the Charing Cross Theatre just off Villiers Street, American playwright M. Kilburg Reedy's stage adaption takes Tey's classic and serves it up with a leavening Shakespearian twist. And what a historical tour de force it is. If you don't know your 15th-century history or House of York genealogy, you certainly will do after an evening here (the programme helpfully includes a family tree). We begin with Grant, who believes he can discern an individual's character through their face, so when his friend – glamorous actress Marta Hallard (played to the nines by Rachel Pickup) – brings him a selection of historical pictures to peruse, he becomes obsessed by the portrait of Richard III. This man doesn't resemble the devious hunchback of history who schemed his way to the throne and then had his nephews murdered in the Tower of London. If anything he looks cautious, thinks Grant (played with great bravura by Rob Pomfret) – sober, decent, more suited to the bench than the dock. So, since he's a detective and has nothing better to do, Grant embarks on a police-style investigation – complete with a board, map and pinned-up photographs of key individuals all connected with string – where with assistance from his sergeant (the excellent Sanya Adegbola) and a young lovelorn American named Brent Carradine (played by Harrison Sharpe, who nearly walks off with the show) he examines the contemporary and near-contemporary evidence for what really happened to the sons of Edward IV – namely Edward V and his brother Richard, Duke of York. What Grant discovers doesn't match up with what the traditional history and Tudor propagandists would have us believe. Chief among those propagandists was, of course, William Shakespeare. His history play Richard III was written in the early 1590s and was required to align with the sentiments of Elizabeth I, granddaughter of the man who defeated Richard III at Bosworth Field in 1485 – Henry Tudor. Rarely in the history of drama (probably not until Alan Rickman gave us Hans Gruber in Die Hard, anyway) has such a delicious, vile but downright charismatic villain ever been conceived as the Bard's 'poisonous bunch-backed toad'. The problem is that the play Shakespeare wrote was mostly rubbish, based on a fishy narrative written by Thomas More in the 1510s. What Tey's book did so expertly was to take Thomas More's version and tear it to pieces, largely by drawing on records and evidence that was much closer to the events described than More ever was. In Reedy's stage play, the same meticulous dissection takes place; so what we get is a journey through historical evidence that exposes the inconsistencies and omissions of the sources and the evidence upon which Shakespeare concocted his version of Richard III. And it's a historical romp – one delivered with all the impassion vim of Simon Schama after his second round of Weetabix. Of course, since it's a dramatisation there are deviations from the original. First, Reedy has taken the implied romance between Grant and Marta Hallard from the book and turned it into a full-blown subplot, one which turns – irony of ironies – on an act of deception that could have graced the pages of a Shakespeare comedy. This however fits remarkably neatly with another change introduced by Reedy, which is to use a Shakespearian actor, Simon Templeton (played brilliantly by Noah Huntley), to give voice to the Tudor 'case' against Richard III. And it works. While Tey's original dialogue is flawless – and Reedy used as much of it as she could, she says – there is so much more to the play, and many more laughs than one would have expected too (thanks not least to the nurses played by Hafsa Abbasi and Janna Fox). For fans of the book, the most significant change to the story comes in the selection of the killer of the young princes. Drawing on original sources, the playwright has come to a different conclusion – but it's one which I think holds just as much water as Tey's prime suspect. It certainly works in the context of the play, even if there are many people around now who believe (based on sound evidence by the way) that both princes actually survived the reign of Richard III and didn't die at all in 1483. What would Tey have made of the playwright's handiwork? I'm not sure she would have approved of the romantic subplot, since she never chose to marry Grant off herself and she could have done in his last outing (The Singing Sands of 1952), published posthumously. But – and it's an important but – the rest of it, I think, is spot on. At the heart of her book is the very probable innocence of Richard III and the concomitant calumny done against him ever since, something this lively play brings indisputably to life. 'Truth is the daughter of time, not authority,' is the Francis Bacon quote that inspired the title. Time will tell if this is the play that finally gets Richard III off the historical naughty step. The Daughter of Time is at the Charing Cross Theatre until 13 September.
BBC News
5 hours ago
- BBC News
Verifying video after deadly Russian strike on Ukraine transport hub
Update: Date: 12:20 BST Title: How many hostages are still in Gaza? Content: The UN Security Council is due to meet later today to discuss the fate of the remaining hostages taken from Israel still held in Gaza. The UN session was called after Palestinian armed groups put out videos showing two of the Israeli hostages, Evyatar David and Rom Braslavski, looking severely emaciated. At BBC Verify, through media reports and video, we've been keeping across the status of the hostages taken into Gaza during the 7 October 2023 armed attacks on Israel by Hamas. Our understanding is that: Regarding hostages no longer in Gaza: Verification work by Alex Murray, Emma Pengelly, and Jamie Ryan Update: Date: 11:39 BST Title: Keeping track of small boats data Content: Anthony ReubenBBC Verify senior journalist The BBC Verify team keeps track of the data on people arriving in the UK on small boats so that we can show how the numbers are changing year-on-year. The Home Office publishes the figures both for the last seven days, external and a time series going back to 2018, external. Each day's figures come out the following day, so we'll get Monday's figures later on. So far this year, 25,436 people have been detected crossing the English Channel in small boats which is almost 50% higher than at the same point last year. Update: Date: 10:58 BST Title: Cooper calls for more robust data on nationality of criminals Content: Robert CuffeBBC Verify head of statistics Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has told BBC Radio 4 Today there should be 'more transparency' about the nationality and immigration status of people accused of crimes. Her comments come after Conservative shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick told the same programme yesterday that 'in London, 40% last year of all of the sexual crimes were committed by foreign nationals, despite the fact that they only make up 25% of the population'. Yesterday we described where the data comes from and why it can't tell us whether foreign nationals as a group are more likely to commit crimes than British nationals without taking into account the different ages of different populations. These warnings apply particularly for small groups such as Eritrean or Afghan nationals. They are much rarer in both the Metropolitan Police data (10 and 16 of the 1,600 sexual offences charged or cautioned last year) and population statistics. When you're dealing with small numbers, minor shifts or weaknesses in the data have an outsized effect: taking four offences from the Afghan total would be a 25% reduction. Update: Date: 10:13 BST Title: Verified video shows damage at Ukraine railway station following Russian drone attack Content: Paul Brown and Peter MwaiBBC Verify We have verified video showing severe damage at a railway station in the Ukrainian city of Lozova in the northern Kharkiv region following reports of a major Russian drone attack overnight. Local authorities say at least one person was killed and 10 injured. The videos show the station's roof, wall and windows have been damaged and a train at the platform has a buckled carriage. We have confirmed the footage was filmed at the city's main railway station by matching the unique facade of the building, benches and coloured paving blocks with imagery available on Google maps. Both Ukraine and Russia have been attacking each other's transport infrastructure in an attempt to disrupt industry and movement of supplies. We are also looking into reports that Tatsinskaya station in the Rostov region in Russia's south was hit overnight and will post here on the live page when we have verified material. Update: Date: 09:46 BST Title: Tuesday on BBC Verify Content: Rob CorpBBC Verify Live editor Hello from the team. We're getting on with verification work following an overnight Russian strike on the Ukrainian town of Lozova which officials say killed at least one person and injured 10 others. Images we've seen so far suggest the attack caused significant damage to the town's railway station - Lozova is a key transport hub for the north-east of Ukraine. Our fact-checkers have been listening to UK Home Secretary Yvette Cooper who has been doing broadcast interviews this morning as the UK's "one in, one out" migrant returns deal with France comes into force. And we'll also be looking for the latest verifiable information coming out of Gaza as it's reported that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is pushing to expand military operations in the Strip. If there's a story you think BBC Verify should investigate then do get in touch with us via this form.
