Israeli forces kill at least 62 in Gaza as strikes continue to hit civilians near aid points - War on Gaza
Israeli forces killed at least 62 people in Gaza on Friday, including 10 who had gathered to receive aid, according to Gaza's civil defence agency.
Spokesperson Mahmud Bassal told AFP that they were killed by Israeli airstrikes and gunfire across the Gaza Strip.
A day earlier, the civil defence agency reported 56 people killed in another wave of Israeli attacks, including six struck at two separate aid distribution points.
Doctors Without Borders (MSF) on Friday slammed the US and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which set up aid distribution sites across the war-torn strip, calling it "slaughter masquerading as humanitarian aid".
According to Gaza's Government Media Office, at least 549 Palestinians have been killed and 4,066 injured by Israeli forces over the past month while attempting to access humanitarian aid.
In a statement posted to Telegram on Wednesday, the office described the so-called "American-Israeli aid centres" as "death traps and traps for daily mass killing and luring," saying they had become sites of repeated massacres.
The statement said the killings occurred as Palestinians attempted to reach food amid "a policy of starvation and comprehensive siege".
According to MSF, in the week of 8 June, shortly after GHF opened a distribution site in central Gaza's Netzarim corridor, its field hospital in nearby Deir el-Balah recorded a 190 percent increase in bullet wound cases compared with the previous week.
It has also previously warned that aid is being weaponised by Israel to forcibly displace Palestinians as part of a broader campaign of ethnic cleansing.
"This initiative seems to be a cynical ploy to feign compliance with International Humanitarian Law," it said, adding that it "uses aid as a tool to forcibly displace people as part of... a broader strategy to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip."
Earlier on Friday, the Palestinian news agency Wafa reported that at least 11 people were killed in Israeli air and drone strikes in southern Gaza.
Israeli warplanes bombed a tent sheltering displaced families in al-Mawasi, a declared "safe zone" south-west of Khan Younis, while drones struck the Bani Suheila and Sheikh Nasser neighbourhoods. One person was also reported killed in a separate airstrike on al-Qarara.
It was unclear whether those casualties were included in the civil defence toll.
Gaza's health ministry said on Friday that Israel has killed at least 56,331 people and wounded more than 132,632 others since 7 October 2023, the majority of them women and children. It said 72 people were killed and 174 injured in the past 24 hours alone.
"A number of victims are still under the rubble and on the streets, and ambulances and civil defence crews cannot reach them," the ministry said.
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