87 killed in Israel raids at aid site, children dying of malnutrition
At least 87 Palestinians have been killed since dawn in Israeli attacks across Gaza, with dozens of children dying from malnutrition during Israel's punishing months-long blockade.
Among the victims on Saturday, 14 were killed in Gaza City, four of them in an Israeli strike on a residence on Jaffa Street in the Tuffah area, which injured 10 others.
At least 30 aid seekers were killed by Israeli army fire north of Rafah, southern Gaza, near the one operating GHF site, which rights groups and the United Nations have slammed as 'human slaughterhouses' and 'death traps'.
According to Al Jazeera Mubasher, Israeli forces fired directly at Palestinians in front of the aid distribution centre in the al-Shakoush area of Rafah.
Reporting from Deir el-Balah, Al Jazeera's Hani Mahmoud said the Israeli army opened fire indiscriminately on a large crowd during one of the attacks.
'Many desperate families in the north have been making dangerous journeys all the way to the south to reach the only operating distribution centre in Rafah,' he said.
'Many of the bodies are still on the ground,' Mahmoud said, adding that those who were wounded in the attack have been transferred to Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis.
Amid relentless daily carnage rained upon starving aid seekers and the ongoing Israeli blockade, Gaza's Government Media Office said 67 children have now died due to malnutrition, and 650,000 children under the age of five are at 'real and immediate risk of acute malnutrition in the coming weeks'.
'Over the past three days, we have recorded dozens of deaths due to shortages of food and essential medical supplies, in an extremely cruel humanitarian situation,' the statement read.
'This shocking reality reflects the scale of the unprecedented humanitarian tragedy in Gaza,' the statement added.
Israel is engineering a 'cruel and Machiavellian scheme to kill' in Gaza, the head of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) said on Friday, as the world body reported that since May, when GHF began its operations, some 800 Palestinians have been killed while seeking aid.
'Under our watch, Gaza has become the graveyard of children [and] starving people,' UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini said.
Mass displacement
As the Israeli military announced on Saturday that its forces attacked Gaza 250 times in the last 48 hours, Israeli officials have continued to push a plan to forcibly displace and eventually expel Palestinians.
Earlier this week, Defense Minister Israel Katz announced a plan to build a so-called 'humanitarian city' which will house 2.1 million Palestinians on the rubble of parts of the city of Rafah, which has been razed to the ground.
But Palestinians in Gaza have rejected the plan and reiterated that they would not leave the enclave. Rights groups, international organisations and several nations have slammed it as laying the ground for 'ethnic cleansing', the forcible removal of a population from its homeland.
Israeli political analyst Akiva Eldar told Al Jazeera on Saturday that the majority of Israelis are 'really appalled' by Katz's plan, which would be 'illegal and immoral'.
'Anybody who will participate in this disgusting project will be involved in war crimes,' Elder said.
The message underlying the plan, he said, is that 'there can't be two people between the river and the sea, and those who deserve to have a state are only the Jewish
people.'
As Israel announces its intention to force the population of Gaza into Rafah, Middle East professor at the University of Turin, Lorenzo Kamel, told Al Jazeera that the expulsion of Palestinians from their land and their concentration in restricted areas is nothing new.
In 1948, 77 years ago to this day, 70,000 Palestinians were expelled from the village of Lydda during what became known as the 'march of death'.
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